PROSE  FANCIES 


RICHARD    LE    CALLIENNE 


K,.  ■ 


\ 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 

LOS  ANGELES 


f. 


PROSE    FANCIES 

SECOND    SERIES 


PROSE  FANCIES 


SECOND  SERIES 


BY 


RICHARD  LeGALLIENNE 


HERBERT  S.  STONE  &  CO.,  CHICAGO 

JOHN   LANE,   LONDON 

MDCCCXCVI 


COPYRIGHT,    1896,    BY 
HERBERTS.  STONE  it  CO. 


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•  • »     It 

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•  ■  •••  V 

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•  •      %    k  •  • 


TO  MAGGIE  LE  GALLIENNE,  WITH 
LOVE 


^  >f?'-■■:•'7^-^*<'  \ 


> 


Poor  are  the  gifts  of  the  poet 
'Nothing  but  words! 
The  gifts  of  kings  are  gold. 
Silver  and  fiocks  and  herds. 
Garments  of  strange  soft  silk. 
Feathers  of  wonderful  birds. 
Jewels  and  precious  stones. 
And  horses  white  as  the  milk — 
These  are  the  gifts  of  Kings; 
But  the  gifts  that  the  poet  brings 
Are  nothing  but  words. 

Forty  Thousand  words  / 
Take  them  —  a  gift  of  flies  ! 
Words  that  should  have  been  birds. 
Words  that  should  have  been  flowers. 
Words  that  should  have  been  stars. 
In  the  eternal  skies. 
Forty  thousand  words! 
Forty  thousand  tears  — 
All  out  of  two  sad  eyes. 


PROS  E      FAN  C  I  E  S  — I 

A       SEVENTH       STORY 
HEAVEN. 


AT  one  end  of  the  city  that  I  love  there 
.  is  a  tall  dingy  pile  of  offices  that  has 
evidently  seen  more  prosperous  for- 
tunes. It  is  not  the  aristocratic  end.  It  is 
remote  from  the  lordly  street  of  the  fine 
shops  of  the  fair  women,  where  in  the  sum- 
mer afternoons  the  gay  bank  clerks  parade 
arm-in-arm  in  the  wake  of  the  tempestuous 
petticoat.  It  lies  aside  from  the  great  ex- 
change which  looks  like  a  scene  from 
Romeo  and  "Juliet  in  the  moonlight,  from 
the  town  hall  from  whose  clocked  and 
gilded  cupola  ring  sweet  chimes  at  mid- 
night, and  whence,  throned  above  the 
city,  a  golden  Britannia,  in  the  sight  of  all 
men,  is  seen  visibly  ruling  the  waves  — 
while  in  the  square  below  the  death  of 
Nelson  is  played  all  day  in  stone,  with  a 
frieze  of  his  noble  words  about  the  pedes- 
tal.    England  expects  !     What  an   influ- 


6  PROSE    FANCIES 

ence  that  stirring  challenge  has  yet  upon 
the  hearts  of  men  may  be  seen  by  any  one 
who  will  study  the  faces  of  the  busy  im- 
aginative cotton  brokers,  who,  in  the 
thronged  and  humming  mornings,  sell  what 
they  have  never  seen  to  a  customer  they 
will  never  see. 

In  fact,  the  end  I  mean  is  just  the 
very  opposite  end  to  that.  It  is  the  end 
where  the  cotton  that  everybody  sells  and 
nobody  buys  is  seen,  piled  in  great  white 
stacks,  or  swinging  in  the  air  from  the 
necks  of  mighty  cranes,  cranes  that  could 
nip  up  an  elephant  with  as  little  ado,  and 
set  him  down  on  the  wharf,  with  a  box  <jn 
his  ugly  ears  for  his  cowardly  trumpeting. 
It  is  the  end  that  smells  of  tar,  the  domain 
of  the  harbour-masters,  where  the  sailor 
finds  a  '  home,' — not  too  sweet,  and  where 
the  wild  sea  is  tamed  in  a  maze  of  gran- 
ite squares  and  basins,  the  end  where 
the  riggings  and  buildings  rise  side  by  side, 
and  a  clerk  might  swing  himself  out  upon 
the  yards  from  his  top  floor  desk.  Here  is 
the  custom-house,  and  the  conversation 
that  shines  is  full  of  freightage  and  dock 
dues ;  here  are  the  shops  that  sell  nothing 


PROSE    FANCIES  7 

but  oilskins,  sextants  and  parrots,  and 
here  the  taverns  do  a  mighty  trade  in  rum. 

It  was  in  this  quarter,  for  a  brief  sweet 
time,  that  Love  and  Beauty  made  their 
strange  home,  as  though  a  pair  of  halcy- 
ons should  choose  to  nest  in  the  masthead 
of  a  cattleship.  Love  and  Beauty  chose 
this  quarter,  as  alas.  Love  and  Beauty 
must  choose  so  many  things  —  for  its 
cheapness.  Love  and  Beauty  were  poor, 
and  office  rents  in  this  quarter  were  ex- 
ceptionally low.  But  what  should  Love 
and  Beauty  do  with  an  office  ?  Love  was 
a  poor  poet  in  need  of  a  room  for  his  bed 
and  his  rhymes,  and  Beauty  was  a  little 
blue-eyed  girl  who  loved  him. 

It  was  a  shabby,  forbidding  place, 
gloomy  and  comfortless  as  a  warehouse  on 
the  banks  of  Styx.  No  one  but  Love  and 
Beauty  would  have  dared  to  choose  it 
for  their  home.  But  Love  and  Beauty 
have  a  great  confidence  in  themselves — a 
confidence  curiously  supported  by  history 
— and  they  never  had  a  moment's  doubt 
that  this  place  was  as  good  as  another  for 
an  earthly  Paradise.  So  Love  signed  an 
agreement  for  one  great  room  at  the  very 


8  PROSE    FANCIES 

top,  the  very  masthead  of  the  building,  and 
Beauty  made  it  pretty  with  muslin  curtains, 
flowers,  and  daiiity  makeshifts  of  furniture, 
but  chiefly  with  the  light  of  her  own  heav- 
enly face.  A  stroke  of  luck  coming  one 
day  to  the  poet,  the  lovers,  with  that  ex- 
travagance which  the  poor  alone  have  the 
courage  to  enjoy,  procured  a  piano  on  the 
kind-hearted  hire-purchase  system,  a  system 
specially  conceived  for  lovers.  Then,  in- 
deed, for  many  a  wonderful  night  that 
room  was  not  only  on  the  seventh  floor, 
but  in  the  seventh  heaven;  and  as  Beauty 
would  sit  at  the  piano,  with  her  long  hair 
flying  loose,  and  her  soul  like  a  whirl  of 
starlight  about  her  brows,  a  stranger  peer- 
ing in  across  the  soft  lamplight,  seeing  her 
face,  hearing  her  voice,  would  deem  that 
the  long  climb,  flight  after  flight  of  dreary 
stair,  had  been  appropriately  rewarded  by 
a  glimpse  of  Heaven. 

Certainly  it  must  have  seemed  a  strange 
contrast  from  the  life  about  and  below  it. 
The  foot  of  that  infernal  stair  plunged  in 
the  warm  rum-and-thick-twist  atmosphere 
of  a  sailor's  tavern  — and  'The  Jolly  Ship- 
mates *    was  a  house   of  entertainment  by 


PROSE    FANCIES  9 

no  means  to  be  despised.  Often  have  I 
sat  there  with  the  poet,  drinking  the  whisky 
from  which  Scotland  takes  its  name,  among 
wondering  sea-boots  and  sou'-westers,  who 
could  make  nothing  of  that  wild  hair  and 
that  still  wilder  talk. 

From  the  kingdom  of  rum  and  tar,  you 
mounted  into  a  zone  of  commission  agents 
and  ship-brokers,  a  chill,  unoccupied  region, 
in  which  every  small  office  bore  the  names 
of  half-a-dozen  different  firms,  and  yet 
somehow  could  not  contrive  to  look  busy. 
Finally  came  an  airy  echoing  landing,  a 
region  of  empty  rooms,  which  the  land- 
lords in  vain  recommended  as  studios  to  a 
city  that  loved  not  art.  Here  dwelt  the 
keeper  and  his  kind-hearted  little  wife,  and 
no  one  besides  save  Love  and  Beauty. 
There  was  thus  a  feeling  of  rarefaction  in 
the  atmosphere,  as  though  at  this  height  it 
was  only  the  Alpine  flora  of  humanity  that 
could  find  root  and  breathing.  But  once 
along  the  bare  passage  and  through  a  cer- 
tain door,  and  what  a  sudden  translation  it 
was  into  a  gracious  world  of  books  and 
flowers  and  the  peace  they  always  bring. 

Once  upon  a  time,  in  that  enchanted 


10        PROSE    FANCIES 

past  where  dwell  all  the  dreams  we  love 
best,  prcciselv,  with  loving  punctuality,  at 
five  in  the  atternoon,  a  pretty  girlish  figure, 
like  Persephone  escaping  from  the  shades, 
stole  through  the  rough  sailors  at  the  foot 
of  that  sordid  Jacob's  ladder  and  made  her 
way  to  the  little  Heaven  at  the  top. 

I  shall  not  describe  her,  for  the  good 
reason  that  I  cannot.  Leonardo,  ever 
curious  of  the  beauty  that  was  most 
strangely  exquisite,  once  in  an  inspired 
hour  painted  such  a  face,  a  face  wrought 
of  the  porcelain  of  earth  with  the  art  of 
Heaven.  But,  whoever  should  paint  it, 
God  certainly  made  it  —  must  have  been 
the  comment  of  anv  one  who  caught  a 
glimpse  of  that  little  figure  vanishing 
heavenwards  up  that  stair,  like  an  Assump- 
tion of  Fra  Angelico's — that  is  any  one 
interested  in  art  and  angels. 

She  had  not  long  to  wait  outside  the 
door  she  sought,  for  the  poet,  who  had 
listened  all  day  for  the  sound,  had  ears  for 
the  whisper  of  her  skirts  as  she  came  down 
the  corridor,  and  before  she  had  time  to 
knock  had  already  folded  her  in  his  arms. 
The  two   babes    in  that  thieves'  wood  of 


PROSE    FANCIES        ii 

commission  agents  and  ship  brokers  stood 
silent  together  for  a  moment,  in  the  deep 
security  of  a  kiss  such  as  the  richest  mil- 
lionaire could  never  buy — and  then  they 
fell  to  comparing  notes  of  their  day's 
work.  The  poet  had  had  one  of  his  rare 
good  days.  He  had  made  no  money,  his 
post  had  been  even  more  disappointing 
than  usual, —  but  he  had  written  a  poem, 
the  best  he  had  ever  written,  he  said,  as  he 
always  said  of  his  last  new  thing.  He  had 
been  burning  to  read  it  to  somebody  all 
afternoon  —  had  with  difficulty  refrained 
from  reading  it  to  the  loquacious  little 
keeper's  wife  as  she  brought  him  some 
coals  —  so  it  was  not  to  be  expected  that 
he  should  wait  a  minute  before  reading  it 
to  her  whom  indeed  it  strove  to  celebrate. 
With  arms  round  each  other's  necks,  they 
bent  over  the  table,  littered  with  the  new- 
born poem,  all  blots  and  dashes  like  the 
first  draft  of  a  composer's  score,  and  the 
poet,  deftly  picking  his  way  among  the 
erasures  and  interlineations,  read  aloud  the 
beautiful  words  —  with  a  full  sense  of 
their  beauty  !  —  to  ears  that  deemed  them 
more    beautiful     even    than    they    were. 


12        PROSE    FANCIES 

The  owners  of  this  now  valuable  copy- 
right allow  me  to  irradiate  my  prose  with 
three  ot"  the  verses. 

*  Ah  !  what,*  half  chanted,  half  crooned 
the  poet  — 

'  Ah  !  what  a  garden  is  your  hair  ! — 
Such  treasure  as  the  kings  of  old, 
In  coffers  of  the  beaten  gold, 
Laid  up  on  earth — and  left  it  there.' 

So  tender  a  reference  to  hair  whose 
beauty  others  beside  the  poet  had  loved 
must  needs  make  a  tender  interruption  — 
the  only  kind  of  interruption  the  poet 
could  have  forgiven  —  and  'Who,'  he 
continued  — 

*  Who  was  the  artist  of  your  mouth  ? 
What  master  out  of  old  Japan. 
Wrought  it  so  dangerous  to  man  .    .   .* 

And  here  it  was  but  natural  that  laugh- 
ter and  kisses  should  once  more  interrupt — 

'  Those  strange  blue  jewels  of  your  eyes, 
Painting  the  lily  of  your  face, 
What  goldsmith  set  them  in  their  place — 
Forget-me-nots  of  Paradise  ? 

*  And  that  blest  river  of  your  voice. 
Whose  merry  silver  stirs  the  rest 
Of  water-lilies  in  your  breast  .   .   .' 


PROSE    FANCIES        13 

At  last,  in  spite  of  more  interruptions, 
the  poem  came  to  an  end  —  whereupon, 
of  course,  the  poet  immediately  read  it 
through  once  more  from  the  beginning,  its 
personal  and  emotional  elements,  he  felt, 
having  been  done  more  justice  on  a  first 
reading  than  its  artistic  excellencies. 

*  Why,  darling,  it  is  splendid,'  was  his 
little  sweetheart's  comment ;  *  you  know 
how  happy  it  makes  me  to  think  it  was 
written  for  me,  don't  you  ?*  And  she  took 
his  hands  and  looked  up  at  him  with  eyes 
like  the  morning  sky. 

Romance  in  poetry  is  almost  exclu- 
sively associated  with  very  refined  ethereal 
matters,  stars  and  flowers  and  such  like  — 
happily,  in  actual  life  it  is  often  associated 
with  much  humbler  objects.  Lovers,  like 
children,  can  make  their  paradises  out  of 
the  quaintest  materials.  Indeed,  our  para- 
dises, if  we  only  knew,  are  always  cheap 
enough  ;  it  is  our  hells  that  are  so  expen- 
sive. Now  these  lovers — like,  if  I  mis- 
take not,  many  other  true  lovers  before 
and  since  —  when  they  were  particularly 
happy,  when  some  special  piece  of  good 
luck  had  befallen  them  could  think  of  no 


14        PROSE    FANCIES 

better  paradise  than  a  little  dinner  together 
in  their  seventh-story  heaven.  'Ah  !  wil- 
derness were  Paradise  enow  !  ' 

To-night  was  obviously  such  an  occa- 
sion. But,  alas  !  where  was  the  money  to 
come  from  ?  They  didn't  need  much  — 
for  it  is  wonderful  how  happy  you  can  be 
on  five  shillings,  if  you  only  know  how. 
At  the  same  time  it  is  difficult  to  be  happy 
on  ninepence  —  which  was  the  entire  for- 
tune of  the  lovers  at  the  moment.  Beauty 
laughingly  suggested  that  her  celebrated 
hair  might  prove  worth  the  price  of  their 
dinner.  The  poet  thought  a  pawnbroker 
might  surely  be  found  to  advance  ten  shil- 
lings on  his  poem  —  the  original  MS.  too 
—  else  had  they  nothing  to  pawn,  save  a 
few  gold  and  silver  dreams  which  they 
couldn't  spare.  What  was  to  be  done  ? 
Sell  some  books,  of  course  !  It  made 
them  shudder  to  think  how  many  poets 
they  had  eaten  in  this  fashion.  It  was 
sheer  cannibalism  —  but  what  was  to  be 
done  !  Their  slender  stock  of  books  had 
been  reduced  entirely  to  poetry.  If  there 
had  only  been  a  philosopher  or  a  modern 
novelist,  the  sacrifice  wouldn't  have  seemed 


PROSE    FANCIES        15 

so  unnatural.  And  then  Beauty's  eyes 
fell  upon  a  very  fat  informing-looking 
volume  on  the  poet's  desk. 

*  Would  n't  this  do  ? '  she  said. 

'  Why,  of  course  ! '  he  exclaimed  ;  '  the 
very  thing.  A  new  history  of  socialism 
just  sent  me  for  review.  Hang  the  review  ; 
we  want  our  dinner,  do  n't  we,  little  one  ? 
And  then  I  've  read  the  preface,  and  looked 
through  the  index  —  quite  enough  to  make 
a  column  of,  with  a  plentiful  supply  of 
general  principles  thrown  in  !  Why,  of 
course,  there  's  our  dinner  for  certain,  dull 
and  indigestible  as  it  looks.  It 's  worth 
fifty  minor  poets  at  old  Moser's.  Come 
along.   .  .   .' 

So  off  went  the  happy  pair  —  ah  !  how 
much  happier  was  Beauty  than  ever  so 
many  fine  ladies  one  knows  who  have 
only,  so  to  say,  to  rub  their  wedding  rings 
for  a  banquet  to  rise  out  of  the  ground, 
with  the  most  distinguished  guests  around 
the  table,  champagne  of  the  best,  and  con- 
versation of  the  worst. 

Old  Moser  found  histories  of  socialism 
profitable,  more  profitable  perhaps  than 
socialism,  and   he   actually  gave  five-and- 


i6        PROSE    FANCIES 

sixpence  for  the  volume.  With  the  nine- 
pence  already  in  their  pockets,  you  will 
see  that  they  were  now  possessors  of  quite 
a  small  fortune.  Six-and-threepence  !  It 
would  n't  pay  for  one's  lunch  nowadays. 
Ah  !  but  that  is  because  the  poor  alone 
know  the  art  of  dining. 

You  need  n't  wish  to  be  happier  and 
merrier  than  those  two  lovers,  as  they 
gaily  hastened  to  that  bright  and  cosy 
corner  of  the  town  where  those  lovely 
ham-and-beef  shops  make  glad  the  faces  of 
the  passers-by.  O  those  hams  with  their 
honest  shining  faces,  polished  like  mahog- 
any—  and  the  man  inside  so  happy  all 
day  slicing  them  with  those  wonderful 
long  knives  (which,  of  course,  the  superior 
class  of  reader  has  never  seen)  worn  away 
to  a  veritable  thread,  a  mere  wire,  but  keen 
as  Excalibur.  Beauty  used  to  calculate 
in  her  quaint  way  how  much  steel  was 
worn  awav  with  each  pound  of  ham,  and 
how  much  therefore  went  to  the  sandwich. 
And  what  an  artist  was  the  carver  !  What 
a  true  eye,  what  a  firm,  flexible  wrist, 
never  a  shaving  of  fat  too  much  —  he  was 
too  great  an  artist  for  that.     Then  there 


PROSE    FANCIES        17 

were  those  dear  little  cream  cheeses  and 
those  little  brown  jugs  of  yellow  cream, 
come  all  the  way  from  Devonshire  —  you 
could  hear  the  cows  lowing  across  the  rich 
pasture,  and  hear  the  milkmaids  singing 
and  the  milk  whizzing  into  the  pail,  as 
you  looked  at  them. 

And  then  those  perfectly  lovely  sau- 
sages —  I  beg  the  reader's  pardon !  I 
forgot  that  the  very  mention  of  the  word 
smacks  of  vulgarity.  Yet,  all  the  same,  I 
venture  to  think  that  a  secret  taste  for 
sausages  among  the  upper  classes  is  more 
widespread  than  we  have  any  idea  of.  I 
confess  that  Beauty  and  her  poet  were  at 
first  ashamed  of  admitting  their  vulgar 
frailty  to  each  other.  They  needed  to 
know  each  other  very  well  first.  Yet 
there  is  nothing,  when  once  confessed, 
that  brings  two  people  so  close  as  —  a 
taste  for  sausages. 

'  You  darling  ! '  exclaimed  Beauty,  with 
something  like  tears  in  her  voice,  when 
her  poet  first  admitted  this  touch  of  na- 
ture —  and  then  next  moment  they  were 
in  fits  of  laughter  that  a  common  taste  for 
a  very  *  low  '  food   should    bring    tears  to 

/ 


i8        PROSE    FANCIES 

their  eyes  !  But  such  are  the  vagaries  of 
love — as  you  will  know,  if  you  know 
anything  about  it  — '  vulgar,'  no  doubt, 
though  only  the  vulgar  would  so  describe 
them  ;  for  it  is  only  vulgarity  that  is 
always  '•  refined.' 

Then  there  was  the  florist's  to  visit. 
What  beautiful  trades  some  people  ply  ! 
To  sell  flowers  is  surely  like  dealing  in 
fairies.  Beautiful  must  grow  the  hands 
that  wire  them,  and  sweet  the  flower-girl's 
every  thought  ! 

There  remained  but  the  wine  mer- 
chant's, or,  had  we  not  better  say  at  once, 
the  grocer's,  for  our  lovers  could  afford  no 
rarer  vintages  than  Tintara  or  the  golden 
burgundy  of  Australia  ;  and  it  is  wonderful 
to  think  what  a  sense  of  festivity  one  of 
those  portly  colonial  flagons  lent  to  their  lit- 
tle dining-table.  Sometimes,  I  may  confide, 
when  they  wanted  to  feel  very  dissipated, 
and  were  very  rich,  they  would  allow  them- 
selves a  small  bottle  of  Benedictine  — 
and  you  should  have  seen  Beauty's  eyes 
as  she  luxuriantly  sipped  at  her  green  little 
liqueur  glass  ;  for,  like  most  innocent  peo- 
ple, she  enjoyed   to  the  full  the  delight  of 


PROSE    FANCIES        19 

feeling  occasionally  wicked.  However, 
these  were  rare  occasions,  and  this  night 
was  not  one  of  them. 

Half  a  pound  of  black  grapes  com- 
pleted their  shopping,  and  then,  with 
their  arms  full  of  their  purchases,  they 
made  their  way  home  again,  the  two 
happiest  people  in  what  is,  after  all,  a 
not  unhappy  world. 

Then  came  the  cooking  and  the  laying 
of  the  table.  For  all  her  Leonardo  face. 
Beauty  was  a  great  cook  —  like  all  good 
women,  she  was  as  earthly  in  some  respects 
as  she  was  heavenly  in  others,  which  I 
hold  to  be  a  wise  combination  —  and,  in- 
deed, both  were  excellent  cooks  ;  and  the 
poet  was  unrivalled  at  'washing  up,'  which, 
I  may  say,  is  the  only  skeleton  at  these 
Bohemian  feasts. 

You  should  have  seen  the  gusto  with 
which  Beauty  pricked  those  sausages  —  I 
had  better  explain  to  the  un-Bohemian 
reader  that  to  attempt  to  cook  a  sausage 
without  first  pricking  it  vigorously  with  a 
fork,  to  allow  for  the  expansion  of  its 
juicy  gases,  is  like  trying  to  smoke  a  cigar 
without  first  cutting  off  the  end — and  O! 


20        PROSE     FANCIES 

to  hear  again  their  merry  song  as  they 
writhed  in  torment  in  the  hissing  pan,  like 
Christian  martyrs  raising  hymns  of  praise 
from  the  very  core  of  Smithficld  fires. 

Meanwhile,  the  poet  would  be  surpass- 
ing himself  in  the  setting  out  of  the  little 
table,  cutting  up  the  bread  reverently  as 
though  it  were  for  an  altar  —  as  indeed 
it  was  —  studying  the  effect  of  the  dish 
of  tomatoes,  now  at  this  corner,  now  at 
that,  arranging  the  flowers  with  much  more 
care  than  he  arranged  the  adjectives  in 
his  sonnets,  and  making  ever  so  sumptu- 
ous an  effect  with  that  half  a  pound  of 
grapes. 

And  then  at  last  the  little  feast  would 
begin,  with  a  long  grace  of  eyes  meeting 
and  hands  clasping ;  true  eyes  that  said 
'  how  good  it  is  to  behold  you,  to  be 
awake  together  in  this  dream  of  life  ;'  true 
hands  that  said  *■  I  will  hold  you  fast  for- 
ever—  not  death  even  shall  pluck  you 
from  my  hand,  shall  loose  this  bond  of 
you  and  me;'  true  eyes,  true  hands,  that 
had  immortal  meanings  far  beyond  the 
speech  of  mortal  words. 

And  it  had  all  come  out  of  that  dull  his- 


PROSE    FANCIES       21 

tory  of  socialism,  and  had  cost  little  more 
than  a  crown  !  What  lovely  things  can  be 
made  out  of  money !  Strange  to  think  that  a 
little  silver  coin  of  no  possible  use  or  beauty 
in  itself  can  be  exchanged  for  so  much 
tangible  beautiful  pleasure.  A  piece  of 
money  is  like  a  piece  of  opium,  for  in  it 
lie  locked  up  the  most  wonderful  dreams 
—  if  you  have  only  the  brains  and  hearts 
to  dream  them. 

When  at  last  the  little  feast  grew  near 
its  end,  Love  and  Beauty  would  smoke 
their  cigarettes  together ;  and  it  was  a 
favorite  trick  of  theirs  to  lower  the  lamp 
a  moment,  so  that  they  might  see  the  stars 
rush  down  upon  them  through  the  skylight 
which  hung  above  their  table.  It  gave 
them  a  sense  of  great  sentinels,  far  away 
out  in  the  lonely  universe,  standing  guard 
over  them,  seemed  to  say  that  their  love 
was  safe  in  the  tender  keeping  of  great 
forces.  They  were  poor,  but  then  they 
had  the  stars  and  the  flowers  and  the  great 
poets  for  their  servants  and  friends  ;  and, 
best  of  all,  they  had  each  other.  Do  you 
call  that  being  poor  ? 

And    then,  in    the    corner,  stood  that 


22        PROSE     FANCIES 

magical  box  with  the  ivory  keys,  whose 
strings  waited  ready  night  and  day  — 
strange  media  through  which  the  myriad 
voices,  the  inner-sweet  thoughts,  of  the 
great  world-soul  found  speech,  messengers 
of  the  stars  to  the  heart,  and  of  the  heart 
to  the  stars. 

Beauty's  songs  were  very  simple. 
She  got  little  practice,  for  her  poet  only 
cared  to  have  her  sing  over  and  over  again 
the  same  sweet  songs  ;  and  perhaps  if  you 
had  heard  her  sing  '  Ask  nothing  more 
of  me,  sweet,'  or  '  Darby  and  Joan,'  you 
would  have  understood  his  indifference  to 
variety. 

At  last  the  little  feast  is  quite,  quite 
finished.  Beauty  has  gone  home ;  her 
lover  still  carries  her  face  in  his  heart  as 
she  waved  and  waved  and  waved  to  him 
from  the  rattling  lighted  tramcar  j  long  he 
sits  and  sits  thinking  of  her,  gazing  up  at 
those  lonely  ancient  stars  ;  the  air  is  still 
bright  with  her  presence,  sweet  with  her 
thoughts,  warm  with  her  kisses,  and  as  he 
turns  to  shut  the  piano,  he  can  still  see  her 
white  hands  on  the  keys  and  her  girlish 


PROSE    FANCIES        23 

face  raised  in  an  ecstasy — Beata  Beatrix 
— above  the  music. 

'  O  love,  my  love  !  if  I  no  more  should  see 
Thyself,  nor  on  the  earth  the  shadow  of  thee, 

Nor  image  of  thine  eyes  in  any  spring  — 
How  then  should  sound  upon  Life  's  darkening  slope 
The  ground  whirl  of  the  perished  leaves  of  Hope, 

The  wind  of  Death  's  imperishable  wing  ! ' 

And  then  ...  he  would  throw  him- 
self upon  his  bed  and  burst  into  tears. 

■  •  •  ■  • 

'  And  they  are  gone  ;  ay,  ages  long  ago  : 
These  lovers  fled  away  into  the  storm,' 

The  seventh-story  heaven  once  more 
leads  a  dull  life  as  the  office  of  a  ship- 
chandler,  and  harsh  voices  grate  the  air 
where  Beauty  sang.  The  books  and  the 
flowers  and  the  lovers'  faces  are  gone 
forever.  I  suppose  the  stars  are  the 
same,  and  perhaps  they  sometimes  look 
down  through  that  roof  window,  and 
wonder  what  has  become  of  those  two 
lovers  who  used  to  look  up  at  them  so 
fearlessly  long  ago. 

But  friends  of  mine  who  believe  in 
God  say  that    He   has   given  His   angels 


24        1'  R  O  S  E    FANCIES 

charge  concerning  that  dingy  old  seventh- 
floor  heaven,  and  that,  for  those  who  have 
eyes  to  see,  there  is  no  place  where  a  great 
dream  has  been  dreamed  that  is  not  thus 
watched  over  by  the  guardian  angels  of 
memory. 

For  M.  Le  G., 

2^  September^  l8g§. 


I 


PROSE     FANCIES  — II 

SPRING    BY    PARCEL 
POST 


They've    taken  all    the    Spring  from  the  country  to  the 

town  — 
Like    the    butter  and  the    eggs,   and  the  milk  from  the 

cow  ,  ,   . 

SO  began  to  jig  and  jingle  my  thoughts 
as  in  my  letters  and  newspapers  this 
morning  I  read,  buried  alive  among  the 
solitary  fastnesses  of  the  Surrey  hills,  the  last 
news  from  town.  The  news  I  envied  most 
was  that  spring  had  already  reached  London. 
'  Now,'  ran  a  pretty  article  on  spring  fash- 
ions, '  the  sunshine  makes  bright  the 
streets,  and  the  flower-baskets,  like  huge 
bouquets,  announce  the  gay  arrival  of 
spring.'  I  looked  up  and  out  through  my 
hillside  window.  The  black  ridge  on  the 
other  side  of  the  valley  stood  a  grim  wall 
of  burnt  heather  against  the  sky  —  which 
sky,  like  the  bullets  in  the  nursery  rhyme, 
was  made  unmistakably  of  lead  ;  a  close 
rain  was   falling   methodically,  and,  gener- 

25 


26        PROSE     FANCIES 

ally  speaking,  the  world  looked  like  a 
soaked  mackintosh.  It  was  n't  much  like 
the  gay  arrival  of  spring,  and  grimly  I 
mused  on  the  advantages  of  life  in  town. 

Certainly  it  did  seem  hard,  I  reflected, 
that  town  should  be  ahead  of  us  even  in 
such  a  country  matter  as  spring.  Flower 
baskets  indeed  !  Why,  we  have  n't  as 
much  as  a  daisy  for  miles  around.  It  is 
true  that  on  the  terrace  there  the  crocuses 
blaze  like  a  street  on  fire,  that  the  prim- 
roses thicken  into  clumps,  lying  among 
their  green  leaves  like  pounds  of  country 
butter  ;  it  is  true  that  the  blue  cones  of  the 
little  grape  hyacinth  are  there,  quaintly 
formal  as  a  child's  toy  flowers  ;  yes  !  and 
the  big  Dutch  hyacinths  are  already  shame- 
lessly enceinte  with  their  buxom  waxen 
blooms,  so  fat  and  fragrant  —  (One  is 
already  delivered  of  a  fine  blossom.  Well, 
that  is  a  fine  baby,  to  be  sure !  say  the 
other  hyacinths,  with  babes  no  less  bonny 
under  their  own  green  aprons  —  all  wait- 
ing for  the  doctor  sun).  Then,  among 
the  blue-green  blades  of  the  narcissus,  here 
and  there  you  see  a  stem  topped  with  a 
creamish     chrysalis-like     envelope,    from 


PROSE    FANCIES        27 

which  will  soon  emerge  a  beautiful  eye, 
rayed  round  with  white  wings,  looking  as 
though  it  were  meant  to  fly,  but  remaining 
rooted  —  a  butterfly  on  a  stalk  ;  while  all 
the  beds  are  crowded  with  indeterminate 
beak  and  blade,  pushing  and  elbowing  each 
other  for  a  look  at  the  sun,  which,  how- 
ever, sulkily  declines  to  look  at  them.  It 
is  true  there  is  spring  on  the  terrace,  but 
even  so  it  is  spring  imported  from  the  town 
—  spring  bought  in  Holborn,  spring  de- 
livered free  by  parcel  post ;  for  where 
would  the  terrace  have  been  but  for  the 
city  seedsman  —  that  magician  who  sends 
you  strangely  spotted  beans  and  mysteri- 
ous bulbs  in  shrivelled  cerements,  weird 
little  flower  mummies  that  suggest  centu- 
ries of  forgotten  silence  in  painted  Egyp- 
tian tombs.  This  strange  and  shrivelled 
thing  can  surely  never  live  again,  we  say, 
as  we  hold  it  in  our  hands,  seeing  not  the 
glowing  circles  of  colour,  tiny  rings  of 
Saturn,  packed  so  carefully  inside  this 
flower-egg,  the  folds  of  green  and  silver 
silk  wound  round  and  round  the  precious 
life  within. 

But,  of  course,  this  is  all  the  seedsman's 


28       PROSE    FANCIES 

cunning,  and  no  credit  to  Nature  ;  and  I 
repeat  that  were  it  not  for  railways  and 
the  parcel  post  —  goodness  knows  whether 
we  should  ever  get  any  spring  at  all  in  the 
country  !  Think  of  the  days  when  it  had 
to  travel  down  by  stage-coach.  For,  left 
to  herself,  what  is  the  best  Nature  can  do 
for  you  with  March  well  on  the  way  ? 
Personally,  I  find  the  face  of  the  country 
practically  unchanged.  It  is,  to  all  intents 
and  purposes,  the  same  as  it  has  been  for 
the  last  three  or  four  months  —  as  grim, 
as  unadorned,  as  bleak,  as  draughty,  and 
generally  as  comfortless  as  ever.  There 
is  n't  a  flower  to  be  seen,  hardly  a  bird 
worth  listening  to,  not  a  tree  that  is  not 
winter-naked,  and  not  a  chair  to  sit  down 
upon.  If  you  want  flowers  on  your  walks 
you  must  bring  them  with  you ;  songs, 
you  must  take  a  poet  under  your  arm  ;  and 
if  you  want  to  rest,  lean  laboriously  on 
your  stick  —  or  take  your  chance  of  rheu- 
matism. 

Of  course  your  specialists,  your  botan- 
ists, your  nature-detectives,  will  tell  you 
otherwise.  They  have  surprised  a  violet 
in  the  act  of   blossoming ;  after   long  and 


PROSE    FANCIES        29 

excited  chase  have  discovered  a  clump 
of  primroses  in  their  vv^ild  state  ;  seen  one 
butterfly,  heard  one  cuckoo.  But  as  one 
swallow  does  not  make  a  summer,  it  takes 
more  than  one  cuckoo  to  make  a  spring. 
I  confess  that  only  yesterday  I  saw  three 
sulphur  butterflies,  with  my  own  eyes  ;  I 
admit  the  catkins,  and  the  silver-notched 
palm  ;  and  I  am  told  on  good  colour  au- 
thority that  there  is  a  lovely  purplish  bloom, 
almost  like  plum  bloom,  over  certain  copses 
in  the  valley  ;  by  taking  thought,  I  have 
observed  the  long  horizonal  arms  of  the 
beech  growing  spurred  with  little  forked 
branches  of  spear-shaped  buds,  and  I  see 
little  green  nipples  pushing  out  through 
the  wolf-coloured  rind  of  the  dwarf  fir- 
trees.  Spring  is  arming  in  secret  to  attack 
the  winter  —  that  is  sure  enough,  but 
spring  in  secret  is  no  spring  for  me.  I 
want  to  see  her  marching  gaily  with  green 
pennons,  and  flashing  sun-blades,  and  a 
good  band. 

I  want  butterflies  as  they  have  them  at 
the  Lyceum  — '  butterflies  all  white,'  '  but- 
terflies all  blue,'  '  butterflies  of  gold,'  and 
I  should  particularly  fancy   '  butterflies  all 


30       PROSE    FANCIES 

black.'  But  there,  again,  you  see, — you 
must  go  to  town,  within  hearing  of  Mrs. 
Patrick  Campbell's  voix  d'or.  I  want  the 
meadows  thickly  inlaid  with  buttercups  and 
daisies  ;  I  want  the  trees  thick  with  green 
leaves,  the  sky  all  larks  and  sunshine  ;  I 
want  hawthorn  and  wild  roses  —  both  at 
once;  I  want  some  go,  some  colour,  some 
warmth  in  the  world.  O  where  are  the 
pipes  of  Pan  ? 

The  pipes  of  Pan  are  in  town,  playing 
at  street  corners  and  in  the  centres  of 
crowded  circuses,  piled  high  with  flower- 
baskets  blazing  with  refulgent  flowery 
masses  of  white  and  gold.  Here  are  the 
flowers  you  can  only  buy  in  town  ;  simple 
flowers  enough,  but  only  to  be  had  in 
town.  Here  are  fragrant  banks  of  violets 
every  few  yards,  conflagrations  of  daffodils 
at  every  crossing,  and  narcissus  in  scented 
starry  garlands  for  your  hair. 

You  wander  through  the  Strand,  or  along 
Regent  street,  as  through  the  meadows  of 
Enna  —  sweet  scents,  sweet  sounds,  sweet 
shapes,  are  all  about  you  ;  the  town  but- 
terflies, white,  blue  and  gold,  '  wheel  and 
shine '  and  flutter  from  shop  to  shop,  sud- 


PROSE    FANCIES        31 

denly  resurgent  from  their  winter  ward- 
robes as  from  a  chrysalis  ;  bright  eyes  flash 
and  flirt  along  the  merry,  jostling  street, 
while  the  sun  pours  out  his  golden  wine 
overhead,  splashing  it  about  from  gilded 
domes  and  bright-faced  windows  —  and 
ever  are  the  voices  at  the  corners  and  the 
crossings  calling  out  the  sweet  flower 
names  of  the  spring  ! 

But  here  in  the  country  it  is  still  all 
rain  and  iron.  I  am  tired  of  waiting  for 
this  slow-moving  provincial  spring.  Let 
us  to  the  town  to  meet  the  spring  —  for : 

They've  taken   all   the    spring    from   the  country  to  the 
town — 
Like    the    butter    and  the  eggs,  and  the  milk  from  the 

cow; 
And  if  you  want  a  primrose,  you  write  to  London   now, 
And  if  you  need  a  nightingale,  well, — Whiteley  sends  it 
down. 


PROSE     FANCIES  — III 

THE    GREAT    M  E  R  R  Y- 
G  O-R  O  U  N  D 

¥ 

IN  an  age  curious  of  new  pleasures,  the 
merry-go-round  seems  still  to  maintain 
its  ancient  popularity.  I  was  the  other 
day  the  delighted,  indeed  the  fascinated, 
spectator  of  one  in  full  swing  in  an  old 
Thames-side  town.  It  was  a  very  superior 
example,  with  a  central  musical  engine 
of  extraordinary  splendour,  and  horses  that 
actually  curvetted,  as  they  swirled  madden- 
ingly round  to  the  strains  of  '  7"he  Man 
that  Broke  the  Bank  at  Monte  Carlo.' 
How  I  longed  to  join  the  wild  riders  !  But 
though  I  am  a  brave  man,  I  confess  that 
to  ride  a  merry-go-round  in  front  of  a 
laughter-loving  Cockney  public  is  more 
than  I  can  dare.  I  had  to  content  myself 
with  watching  the  faces  of  the  riders.  I 
noticed  particularly  one  bright-eyed  little 
girl,  whose  whole  passionate  young  soul 
seemed  to  be  on  fire  with  ecstacy,  and  for 

32 


PROSE    FANCIES        33 

whom  it  was  not  difficult  to  prophesy 
trouble  when  time  should  bring  her  within 
reach  of  more  dangerous  excitements. 
Then  there  was  a  stolid  little  boy,  dull  and 
unmoved  in  expression  as  though  he  v/ere 
in  church.  Life,  one  felt  sure,  would  be 
safe  enough,  and  stupid  enough,  for  him  ; 
the  world  would  have  no  music  to  stir  or 
draw  him.  The  fifes  would  go  down  the 
street  with  a  sweet  sound  of  marching  feet, 
and  the  eyes  of  other  men  would  brighten 
and  their  blood  be  all  glancing  spears  and 
streaming  banners,  but  he  would  remain 
behind  his  counter ;  from  the  strange  hill 
beyond  the  town  the  dear,  unholy  music, 
so  lovely  in  the  ears  of  other  men  and 
maids,  would  call  to  him  in  vain,  and  morn- 
ing and  evening  the  stars  would  sing  above 
his  draper's  shop,  but  he  never  hear  a 
word. 

What  particularly  struck  me  was  the 
number  of  quite  grown-up,  even  elderly, 
people  who  came  and  had  their  penny- 
worth of  horse  exercise.  Now  it  was  a 
grave  young  workman  quietly  smoking  his 
pipe  as  he  revolved  ;  now  it  was  a  stout 
middle-aged  woman  returning  from  mark- 


34       PROSE    FANCIES 

eting,  on  whom  the  Zulu  music  and  the 
whirling  horses  laid  their  irresistible  spells. 
Unless  ye  become  as  little  children  ! 

Is  the  Kingdom  of  Heaven  really  at 
hand  ?  For,  indeed,  men  and  women,  and 
perhaps  particularly  literary  men  and 
women,  are  once  more  becoming  as  little 
children  in  their  pleasures. 

Seriously,  one  of  the  most  curious  and 
significant  of  recent  literary  phenomena  is 
the  sudden  return  of  the  literary  man  to 
physical,  and  so-called  '  Philistine',  pleas- 
ures and  modes  of  recreation.  Perhaps 
Stevenson  set  the  fashion  with  his  canoe 
and  his  donkey.  But  at  the  moment  that 
he  was  valiantly  daring  any  one  to  tell 
him  whether  there  was  anything  better 
worth  doing  '  than  fooling  among  boats,' 
Edward  Fitzgerald,  all  unconscious  and 
careless  of  literary  fashions,  was  giving  still 
more  practical  expression  to  the  physical 
faith  that  was  in  him,  by  going  shares  in  a 
Lowestoft  herring-lugger,  and  throwing  his 
heart  as  well  as  his  money  into  the  fortunes 
of  its  noble  skipper  '  Posh.'  A  literary 
man  par  excellence^  Mr.  Lang  reproaches 
his  sires  for  his  present  way  of  hfe  — 


PROSE    FANCIES 

*  Why  lay  your  gipsy  freedom  down 
And  doom   your  child  to  pen  and  ink?' 


35 


and  by  steady  and  persistent  golfing  and 
writing  about  angling  and  cricket,  comes 
as  near  to  the  noble  savage  as  is  possible 
to  so  incorrigibly  civilised  a  man.  Mr. 
Henley — that  Berserker  of  the  pen  — 
sings  the  sword  with  a  vigour  that  makes 
one  curious  to  see  him  using  it,  and  we  all 
know  Mr.  Kipling's  views  on  the  matter. 
Then  Mr.  Bernard  Shaw  rides  a  bicycle  ! 

Those  men  of  letters  whose  inclinations 
or  opportunities  do  not  lead  them  to  these 
out-of-door  and  more  or  less  ferocious, 
pleasures  seek  to  forget  themselves  at  the 
music  hall,  the  Aquarium  or  the  numerous 
Earl's  Court  exhibitions.  They  become 
amateurs  of  foreign  dancing,  connoisseurs 
of  the  trapeze,  or  they  leave  their  great 
minds  at  home  and  go  up  the  Great  Wheel. 
Earl's  Court,  particularly,  is  becoming 
quite  a  modern  Vauxhall — Tan-ta-ra-ra  ! 
Earl's  Court!  Earl's  Court!  —  and  Mr. 
Imre  Kiralfy,  with  his  conceptions  and 
designs,  is  to  our  generation  what  Albert 
Smith  was  to  the  age  of  Dickens  and  Ed- 
mund Yates. 


36        IMl  O  S  E    FANCIES 

It  takes  some  experience  of  life  to  real- 
ise how  right  this  is  ;  to  reahse  that,  after 
all  our  tine  philosophies  and  cocksure 
sciences,  there  is  no  better  answer  to  the 
riddle  of  things  than  a  good  game  of  cricket 
or  an  exciting  spin  on  one's  *  bike.*  The 
real  inner  significance  of  Earl's  Court  — 
Mr.  Kiralfy  will  no  doubt  be  prepared  to 
hear  —  is  the  failure  of  science  as  an 
answer  to  life.  We  give  up  the  riddle, 
and  enjoy  ourselves  with  our  wiser  chil- 
dren. Simple  pleasures,  no  doubt,  for  the 
profound  !  But  what  is  simple,  and  what 
is   profound  ? 

The  simple  joy  we  get  from  '  fooling 
among  boats  '  on  a  summer  day,  the  thrill 
of  a  well-hit  ball,  the  rapture  of  a  skilful 
dive,  are  no  more  easy  to  explain  than  the 
more  complicated  pleasures  of  literature, 
or  art,  or  religion.  And  why  is  it  —  to 
come  closer  to  our  theme  —  that  the 
round  or  the  whirling  have  such  attraction 
for  us  ?  What  is  the  secret  of  the  fasci- 
nation of  the  circle  ?  Why  is  it  that  the 
turning  of  anything,  be  it  but  a  barrel- 
organ  or  a  phrase,  holds  one  as  with  an 
hypnotic  power  ?      I    confess   that    I    can 


PROSE    FANCIES        37 

never  genuinely  pity  a  knife-grinder,  how- 
ever needy.  Think  of  the  pleasure  of 
driving  that  vi^heel  all  day,  the  merry  chirp 
of  the  knife  on  the  stone,  and  the  crisp 
bright  spray  of  the  flying  sparks  !  Why, 
he  does  *  what  some  men  dream  of  all 
their  lives '  !  Wheels  of  all  kinds  have 
the  same  strange  charm;  mill-wheels, 
colliery-wheels,  spinning-wheels,  water- 
wheels,  and  wheeling  waters  :  there  may  — 
who  knows  ?  —  have  been  a  certain  pleas- 
ure in  being  broken  on  the  wheel,  and,  at 
all  events,  that  hideous  punishment  is  an- 
other curious  example  of  the  fascination  of 
the  circle.  It  would  take  a  whole  volume 
to  illustrate  the  prevalence  of  the  circle  in 
external  nature,  in  history,  and,  even  more 
significant,  in  language.  We  all  know,  or 
think  we  know,  that  the  world  is  round  — 

♦  This  orb  —  this  round 
Of  sight  and  sound,' 

as  Mr.  Quiller  Couch  sings  —  though  I 
remember  a  porter  at  school  who  was  sure 
that  it  was  flat,  and  who  used  to  say  that 
Hamlet's 

*  How  weary,  stale,  flat,  and  unprofitable 
Seem  to  me  all  the  uses  of  this  world!' 


38        PROSE    FANCIES 

was  a  cryptic  reference  to  Shakespeare's 
secret  belief  in  his  theory.  Many  of  the 
things  we  love  most  are  round.  Is  not 
money,  according  to  the  proverb,  made 
round  that  it  may  go  round,  and  are  not 
the  men  most  in  demand  described  as  'all- 
round  men'  ?  Nor  are  all-round  women 
without  their  admirers.  Events,  we  know, 
move  in  a  circle,  as  time  moves  in  cycles 
—  though,  alas  !  not  on  them.  The  bal- 
let and  the  bicycle  are  popular  forms  of  the 
circle,  and  it  is  the  charm  of  the  essay  to 
be  '  roundabout.' 

Again,  how  is  it  that  that  which  on  a 
small  scale  does  not  impress  us  at  all, 
when  on  a  large  scale  impresses  us  so 
much?  What  is  the  secret  of  the  im- 
pressiveness  of  size,  bulk,  height,  depth, 
speed,  and  mileage  ?  Philosophically,  a 
mountain  is  no  more  wonderful  than  a 
mole-hill,  yet  no  man  is  knighted  for 
climbing  a  mole-hill.  One  little  drop  of 
water  and  one  little  grain  of  sand  are 
essentially  as  wonderful  as  '  the  mighty 
ocean  '  or  '  the  beauteous  land  '  to  which 
they  contribute.  A  balloon  is  no  more 
wonderful  than   an   air-bubble    and   were 


PROSE    FANCIES        39 

you  to  build  an  Atlantic  liner  as  big  as  the 
Isle  of  Wight  it  would  really  be  no  more 
remarkable  than  an  average  steam  launch. 
Nobody  marvels  at  the  speed  of  a  snail, 
yet,  given  a  snail's  pace  to  start  with,  an 
express  train  follows  as  a  matter  of  course. 
Movement,  not  the  rate  of  movement,  is 
the  mystery.  Precisely  the  same  materi- 
als, the  same  forces,  the  same  methods, 
are  employed  in  the  little  as  in  the  big  of 
these  examples.  Why  should  mere  ac- 
cumulation, reiteration,  and  magnification 
make  the  difference  ?  We  may  ask  why  ? 
But  it  does,  for  all  that.  If  we  answer 
that  these  mammoth  multiplications  im- 
press us  because  they  are  so  much  bigger, 
taller,  fatter,  faster,  etc.,  than  we  are,  the 
question  arises,  How  many  times  bigger 
than  a  man  must  a  mountain  be  before  it 
impresses  us  ?  Perhaps  the  problem  has 
already  been  tackled  by  the  schoolman 
who  pondered  how  many  angels  could 
dance  on  the  point  of  a  needle. 

However,  these  and  similar  first  princi- 
ples, it  will  readily  be  seen,  are  far  from 
being  irrelevant  for  the  visitor  at  the  Earl's 
Court    Exhibition.       No   doubt    they    are 


40        PROSE    FANCIES 

continually  discussed  by  the  thousands  who 
daily  and  nightly  throng  that  very  charm- 
ing dream-world  which  Mr.  Kiralfy  has 
built  '  midmost  the  beating'  of  our  'steely 
sea.' 

To  an  age  that  is  over-read  and  over-fed 
Mr.  Kiralfy  brings  the  message  :  '  Leave 
your  great  minds  at  home,  and  go  up  the 
Great  Wheel  !  '  and  I  heard  his  voice  and 
obeyed.  The  sensation  is,  I  should  say, 
something  between  going  up  in  a  balloon 
and  being  upon  shipboard  —  a  sensation 
compounded,  maybe,  of  the  creaking  of 
the  circular  rigging,  the  pleasure  of  rising 
in  the  air,  the  freshening  of  the  air  as  you 
ascend,  the  strange  feeling  of  the  earth 
receding  and  spreading  out  beneath  you, 
the  curious  diminution  of  the  people  below 
—  to  their  proper  size.  You  will  hear 
original  minds  all  about  you  comparing 
them  to  ants,  and  it  is  curious  to  notice 
the  involuntary  feeling  of  contempt  that 
possesses  you  as  you  watch  them.  I  be- 
lieve one  has  a  half-defined  illusion  that 
we  are  growing  greater  as  they  are  grow- 
ing smaller.  Ants  and  flics  !  ants  and 
flies  !   with  here  and  there  a  fiery  centipede 


PROSE    FANCIES       41 

in  the  shape  of  a  District  train  dashing  in 
and  out  amongst  them.  We  lose  the 
power  of  understanding  their  motions,  and 
their  throngs  and  movements  do  indeed 
seem  as  purposeless  at  this  height  as  the 
hurry-scurrying  about  an  ant-hill.  At  this 
height,  indeed,  one  seems  to  understand 
how  small  a  matter  a  bank  smash  may 
seem  to  the  Almighty  •,  though,  as  a  lady 
said  to  me  —  as  we  clung  tightly  together 
in  terror  '  a-top  of  the  topmost  bough  ' — 
it  must  be  gratifying  to  see  so  many 
churches. 

Those  who  would  keep  their  illusions 
about  the  beauty  of  London  had  better 
stay  below,  at  least  in  the  daytime,  for  it 
makes  one's  heart  sink  to  look  on  those 
miles  and  miles  of  sordid  grey  roofs  hud- 
dled in  meaningless  rows  and  crescents, 
just  for  all  the^world  like  a  huge  child's 
box  of  wooden  bricks  waiting  to  be  arranged 
into  some  intelligible  pattern.  Of  course, 
this  is  not  London  proper.  Were  the 
Great  Wheel  set  up  in  Trafalgar  Square, 
one  is  fain  to  hope  that  the  view  from  it 
would  be  less  disheartening  —  though  it 
might  be  better  not  to  try. 


42        PROSE    FANCIES 

By  night,  except  fur  the  bright  oases  of 
the  Indian  Exhibition,  the  view  is  httle 
more  than  a  black  blank,  a  great  inky  plain 
with  faint  sparks  and  rows  of  light  here 
and  there,  as  though  the  world  had  been 
made  of  saltpetre  paper,  and  had  lately 
been  set  fire  to.  Were  you  a  traveller 
from  Mars  you  would  say  that  the  world 
was  very  badly  lighted.  But,  for  all  that, 
night  is  the  time  for  the  Great  Wheel,  for 
the  conflagration  of  pleasure  at  our  feet 
makes  us  forget  the  void  dark  beyond. 
Then  the  Wheel  seems  like  a  great  re- 
volving spider's  web,  with  fireflies  entan- 
gled in  it  at  every  turn,  and  the  little 
engine-house  at  the  centre,  with  its  two 
electric  lights,  seems  like  the  great  lord 
spider,  with  monstrous  pearls  for  his  eyes. 
And,  as  in  the  daytime  the  height  robs  the 
depth  of  its  significance,  strips  poor  hu- 
manity of  any  semblance  of  impressive  or 
attractive  meaning,  at  night  the  efi^ect  is 
just  the  reverse.  What  a  fairy  world  is 
this  opening  out  beneath  our  feet,  with  its 
golden  glowing  squares  and  circles  and 
palaces,  with  its  lamplit  gardens  and  pago- 
das, and  who  are  these  gay  and  beautiful 


PROSE    FANCIES       43 

beings  flitting  hither  and  thither,  and  pass- 
ing from  one  bright  garden  to  another  on 
the  stream  of  pleasure  !  If  this  many- 
coloured,  passionate  dream  be  really  human 
life,  let  us  hasten  to  be  down  amongst  it 
once  more  !  And,  after  all,  is  not  this 
flattering  night  aspect  of  the  world  more 
true  than  that  disheartening  countenance 
of  it  in  the  daylight?  Those  golden 
squares  and  glowing  gardens  and  flashing 
waters  are,  of  course,  an  illusion  of  the 
magician  Kiralfy's,  yet  what  power  could 
the  illusion  have  upon  us  without  the  re- 
alities of  beauty  and  love  and  pleasure  it 
attracts  there  ? 


PROSE     FANCIES  — IV 

THE   BURIAL  OF  ROMEO 
AND  JULIET 

ONE  morning  of  all  mornings  the  citi- 
zens of  Verona  were  startled  by 
strange  news.  Tragic  forces,  to 
which  they  had  been  accustomed  to  pay 
little  heed,  had  been  at  work  in  their  city 
during  the  dark  hours,  and  young  Romeo 
of  the  Montagues,  handsome,  devil-me- 
care  lad  as  they  had  known  him,  and  little 
Juliet  of  the  Capulets,  that  mad-cap, 
merry,  gentle  young  mistress,  lay  dead, 
side  by  side  in  the  church  of  Santa  Maria. 

Death!  surely  they  were  used  to  death! 
and  Love,  flower  of  the  clove!  they  were 
used  to  love.  But  here  were  love  and  death, 
that  somehow  they  could  not  understand. 
So  they  hurried  in  wondering  groups  to 
Santa  Maria,  that  they  might  gaze  at  the 
dead  lovers,  and  thus  perhaps  come  to  un- 
derstand. 

Romeo   and   Juliet   lay   receiving  their 

44 


PROSE    FANCIES        45 

guests  in  the  vault  of  the  Capulets,  with 
a  strange  smile  of  welcome  for  all  who 
came.  And  their  presence-chamber  was 
bright  with  candles  and  flowers,  and  sweet 
with  the  sweet  smell  of  death.  The  air 
that  had  drunk  in  their  wild  words  and 
their  last  long  looks  of  heavenly  love  still 
hung  about  the  dark  corners,  as  the  air 
where  a  rose  has  been  holds  a  little  while 
the  memory  of  its  breath.  Yes !  that 
morning,  in  that  dank  but  shining  tomb, 
you  might  draw  into  you  the  very  breath 
of  love.  The  air  you  breathed  had  passed 
through  the  sweet  lungs  of  Juliet,  it  had 
been  etherialised  with  her  holy  passion, 
and  washed  clean  with  her  lovely  words. 
And  now,  for  a  little  while  yet,  it  feasted 
on  the  fair  peace  of  their  glad  young  faces. 
To-morrow,  or  the  next  day,  or  the  next 
week,  they  would  belong  to  the  unvisited 
treasure-house  of  the  past,  but  now  this 
morning  of  all  mornings,  this  day  that 
could  never  come  again,  they  still  belonged 
to  the  real  and  radiant  present. 

Flowers  there  are  that  bloom  but  once 
in  a  hundred  years,  but  here  in  this  tomb 
had  blossomed    one  of   those  marvellous 


46        PROSE    FANCIES 

flowers  that  bloom  but  once  throughout 
eternity.  Poets  and  kings  in  after-times, 
O  men  of  Verona,  will  yearn  to  have 
seen  what  you  look  upon  to-day.  For 
you,  you  thick  and  greasy  citizens,  are 
chosen  out  of  all  time  to  behold  this 
beauty.  There  were  once  in  the  world 
thousands  of  men  and  women  who  had 
heard  the  very  words  of  Christ  as  they  fell 
from  His  lips,  words  that  we  may  only 
read.  There  have  been  men,  actual,  liv- 
ing, foolish  men,  who  have  looked  on  at 
the  valour  of  Horatius,  men  who,  from 
the  crowded  banks  of  the  Nile,  have 
watched  the  living  body  of  Cleopatra  step 
into  her  gilded  barge,  men  who,  standing 
idle  in  the  streets  of  Florence,  have  seen 
the  love-light  start  in  the  great  Dante's 
eyes,  seen  his  hand  move  to  his  laden 
heart,  as  the  little  Beatrice  passed  him  by 
among  her  maidens.  Base  men  of  the 
past,  by  the  indulgent  accident  of  time, 
have  been  granted  to  behold  these  wonders, 
and  now  for  you,  O  men  of  Verona,  a 
like  wonder  has  been  born. 

Romeo  and    Juliet   lay  receiving   their 


PROSE    FANCIES     47 

guests  in  the  vault  of  the  Capulets,  with 
a  strange  smile  of  welcome  for  all  who 
came. 

It  had  been  an  innocent  little  desire, 
yet  had  all  the  world  come  against  it.  It 
had  been  a  simple  little  desire,  yet  too 
strong  for  all  the  world  to  break. 

Strange  this  enmity  of  the  world  to  love, 
as  though  men  should  take  arms  against 
the  song  of  a  bird,  or  plot  against  the 
opening  of  a  flower. 

But  now,  what  was  this  strange  homage 
to  a  love  that  a  few  hours  ago  had  no  friend 
in  all  the  daylight,  a  fearful  bliss  beneath 
the  secret  moon  ?  But  yesterday  a  stupid 
old  nurse,  a  herb-gathering  friar,  a  rascally 
apothecary,  had  been  their  only  friends, 
and  now  was  all  the  world  come  here  to 
do  their  bidding. 

No  need  to  steal  again  beneath  the 
shade  of  orchard  walls,  no  need  again  to 
heed  if  lark  or  nightingale  sang  in  the  red- 
dening east.  For  the  world  had  grown 
all  warm  to  love,  warm  and  kind  as  June 
to  the  rose. 

Three  days  lay  Romeo  and  Juliet  re- 


48        IM^  O  S  E    FANCIES 

ceiving  their  guests  in  the  vault  of  the 
Capulets,  with  that  strange  smile  of  wel- 
come for  all  who  came.  Three  days  the 
world  worshipped  the  love  it  could  not  un- 
derstand, but  still  came  dense  and  denser 
throngs  to  worship.  For  the  news  of  the 
wonderful  flower  that  had  blossomed  in 
Verona  had  gone  far  and  wide,  and  trav- 
ellers from  distant  cities  kept  pouring  in 
to  look  at  those  strange  young  lovers,  who 
had  deemed  the  world  well  lost  so  that 
they  might  leave  it  together. 

Then  the  governor  of  the  city  decreed, 
as  the  time  drew  near  when  the  two  lovers 
must  be  left  to  their  peace,and  it  was  ill  that 
any  should  lose  the  sight  of  this  marvel, 
that  on  the  fourth  day  they  should  be  car- 
ried through  the  streets  in  the  eyes  of  all 
the  people,  and  then  be  buried  together  in 
the  vault  of  the  Capulets  —  for  by  this 
burial  in  the  same  tomb,  says  the  old 
chronicler,  who  was  first  honoured  with  the 
telling  of  their  sweet  story,  the  governor 
hoped  to  bring  about  a  peace  between  the 
Montagues  and  Capulets,  at  least  for  a 
little  while. 

Meanwhile,  though   Verona  was  a  city 


PROSE    FANCIES 


49 


of  many  trades  and  professions,  and  love 
and  death  were  idle  things,  yet  was  there 
little  said  of  business  all  these  days,  and 
little  else  done  but  talk  of  the  two  lovers, 
of  whom,  indeed,  it  was  true,  as  it  has 
seldom  been  true  out  of  holy  writ,  that 
death  was  swallowed  up  in  victory.  Dur- 
ing these  days,  also,  there  stole  a  strange 
sweetness  over  the  city,  as  though  the 
very  spirit  of  love  had  nested  there,  and 
was  filling  the  air  with  its  soft  breathing 
— as  when,  in  the  first  days  of  spring,  the 
birds  sing  so  sweetly  that  broken  hearts 
must  hide  away,  and  hard  hearts  grow  a 
little  kind.  Men  once  more  spoke  kindly 
to  their  wives,  and  even  coarse  faces  wore 
a  gentle  light — just  as  sometimes  at  even- 
ing the  setting  sun  will  turn  to  tenderness 
even  black  rocks  and  frowning  towers. 

There  were  many  wild  stories  afloat 
about  the  end  of  the  lovers.  Some  said 
one  way,  and  some  another.  By  some 
the  story  went  that  Romeo  was  already 
dead  before  Juliet  had  awakened  from  her 
swoon,  but  others  declared  that  the  poison 
had  not  worked  upon  him  until  Juliet's 
awakening  had   made   him    awhile   forget 


50        PROSE    FANCIES 

that  he  was  to  die.  There  were  those 
who  professed  to  know  the  very  words  of 
their  wild  farewell,  and  in  fact  there  had 
been  several  witnesses  of  Juliet's  agony 
over  the  body  of  her  lord.  These  had 
told  how  first  she  had  raved  and  clung  to 
him,  and  called  him  'Romeo,'  *■  Sweet  Sir 
Romeo,'  '  Husband,'  and  many  flower- 
like names,  and  had  petted  him  and  wooed 
him  to  come  back.  Then  on  a  sudden 
she  had  cried,  '  God-a-mercy — how  cold 
thou  art!'  and  looked  at  him  long  and 
strangely.  Then  had  she  grown  stern, 
and  anon  soft.  '  Canst  thou  not  come 
back,  my  love?  Then  must  I  follow 
thee.  Not  so  far  art  thou  on  the  way  of 
death,  but  that  I  shall  overtake  thee,  and 
together  shall  we  go  to  Pluto's  realm,  and 
seek  a  kinder  world.' 

Thereat  she  had  plunged  Romeo's  dag- 
ger into  her  side,  though  some  said  she 
had  stopped  her  heart's  beating  by  the 
strong  will  of  her  great  love.  Yea  — 
such  were  the  distracted  rumours  —  some 
averred  that  at  the  last  she  had  cursed 
Christ  and  his  saints,  and  called  upon 
Venus,  whom,  it   was   rumoured    in  awe- 


PROSE    FANCIES        51 

struck  whispers,  was  being  worshipped 
once  more  in  secret  corners  of  the  world. 

It  was  strong  noon  when,  on  the  fourth 
day,  Romeo  and  Juliet  were  carried 
through  the  bright  and  solemn  streets,  that 
the  world  might  be  saved ;  saved  as  ever 
by  the  spectacle  and  the  worship  of  a  mys- 
terious nobility,  an  uncomprehended  great- 
ness, a  beauty  which  haunts  not  its  daily 
dreams,  lifted  up  by  the  humble  gaze  of 
devout  eyes  into  the  empyrean  of  greater 
souls,  stirred  to  an  unfamiliar  passion,  and 
fired  with  glimpses  of  a  strange,  unworldly 
truth. 

In  the  light  of  the  sun,  the  faces  of  the 
two  lovers,  as  they  lay  amid  their  flowers, 
seemed  to  have  grown  a  little  weary,  but 
they  still  wore  their  sweet  and  royal  smile, 
and  their  laurelled  brows  were  very  white 
and  proud. 

And  in  the  faces  that  looked  upon  them, 
as  they  moved  slowly  by,  with  sweet  death 
music,  and  the  hushed  marching  of  feet, 
and  the  wafted  odour  of  lilies,  there  was  to 
be  seen  strangely  blent  a  great  pity  for 
their    tragedy  and    a   heavenly  tenderness 


52        PROSE    FANCIES 

for  their  love.  It  was  like  a  dream  pass- 
ing down  the  streets  of  a  dream,  so  deep 
and  tender  was  the  silence,  for  only  the 
hearts  of  men  were  speaking  ;  though  here 
and  there  a  girl  sobbed,  or  a  young  man 
buried  his  face  in  his  sleeve, and  the  stern- 
est eyes  were  dashed  with  the  holy  water 
of  tears.  And  with  the  pity  and  tender- 
ness, who  shall  say  but  that  in  all  that 
silent  heart-speech  there  was  no  little 
envy  of  the  two  who  had  loved  so 
truly  and  died  in  the  springtide  of  their 
love,  before  the  ways  of  love  had  grown 
dusty  with  its  summer,  or  dreary  with  its 
autumn,  before  its  dreams  had  petrified 
into  duties,  and  its  passion  deadened  into 
use  ? 

'Would  it  were  thou  and  I,'  said  many 
wedded  eyes  one  to  the  other,  delusively 
warm  and  soft  for  a  moment,  but  all  cold 
and  hard  again  on  the  morrow. 

And  maybe  some  poet  would  say  in  his 
heart : 

'  If  you  loved  her  living,  my  Romeo, 
what  were  your  love  could  you  but  see 
her  dead  ! '  for  indeed  life  has  no  beauty 
so  wonderful  as  the  beauty  of  death. 


PROSE    FANCIES       53 

And,  as  in  all  places  and  times,  there 
was  a  base  remnant  that  gaped  and  wor- 
shipped not,  and  in  their  hearts  resented 
all  this  distinction  paid  to  a  nobility  they 
could  not  recognise,  as  the  like  had 
grumbled  when  Cimabue's  Madonna  had 
been  carried  through  the  streets  in  glory. 
But  of  these  there  is  no  need  that  we 
should  take  account,  any  more  than  of 
the  beasts  that  meed  head  down  amid 
the  pastures  outside  the  town,  knowing 
not  of  the  wonder  that  was  passing  within. 
For  the  ass  will  munch  his  thistles  though 
the  Son  of  Man  be  his  rider,  nor  will  the 
sheep  look  aside  from  his  grazing  though 
Apollo  be  the  herdsman. 

At  length  the  sacred  pageant  was  ended, 
gone  like  the  passing  of  an  aerial  music, 
and  the  people  went  to  their  homes  silent, 
with  haunted  eyes  ;  while  the  Earth,  which 
had  given  this  beauty,  took  it  back  to  her- 
self, and  one  more  Persephone  of  human 
loveliness  was  shut  within  the  gates  of  the 
forgetful  grave. 


PROSE     FANCIE  S  — V 

VARIATIONS     UPON 
WHITEBAIT 


AVERY  Pre-Raphaelite  friend  of  mine 
came  to  me  one  day  and  said,  a 
propos  of  his  having  designed  a  very 
Early  English  chair:  'After  all,  if  one 
has  anything  to  say  one  might  as  well  put 
it  into  a  chair  ! ' 

I  thought  the  remark  rather  delicious, 
as  also  his  other  remark  when  one  day  in 
a  curiosity-shop  we  were  looking  at  an- 
other chair,  which  the  dealer  declared  to 
be  Norman.  My  friend  seated  himself  in 
it  very  gravely,  and  after  softly  moving 
about  from  side  to  side,  testing  it,  it  would 
appear,  by  the  sensation  it  imparted  to  the 
sitting  portion  of  his  limbs,  he  solemnly 
decided:  '  I  don't  think  \.\\^  flavour  of  this 
chair  is  Norman  ! ' 

I  thought  of  this  Pre-Raphaelite  brother 
as  the  Sphinx  and  I  were  seated  a  few 
evenings  ago  at  our  usual  little  dinner,  in 

54 


PROSE    FANCIES        55 

our  usual  little  sheltered  corner,  on  the 
Lover's  Gallery  of  one  of  the  great  London 
restaurants.  The  Sphinx  says  that  there 
is  only  one  place  in  Europe  where  one  can 
really  dine,  but  as  it  is  impossible  to  be 
always  within  reasonable  train  service  of 
that  Montsalvat  of  cookery,  she  consents 
to  eat  with  me — she  cannot  call  it  dine  — 
at  the  restaurant  of  which  I  speak.  I  be- 
ing very  simple-minded,  untravelled  and 
unlanguaged,  think  it,  in  my  Cockney 
heart,  a  very  fine  place  indeed,  with  its 
white  marble  pillars  surrounding  the  spa- 
cious peristyle  and  flashing  with  a  thousand 
brilliant  lights  and  colours  :  with  its  stately 
cooks,  clothed  in  white  samite,  mystic 
wonderful,  ranged  behind  a  great  altar 
loaded  with  big  silver  dishes,  and  the 
sacred  musicians  of  the  temple  ranged  be- 
hind them  —  while  in  and  out  go  the 
waiters,  clothed  in  white  and  black, 
waiters  so  good  and  kind  that  I  am  com- 
pelled to  think  of  Elijah  being  waited  on 
by  angels. 

They  have  such  an  eye  for  a  romance, 
too,  and  really  take  it  personally  to  heart 
if  it   should  befall  that  our  little  table  is 


56        PROSE    FANCIES 

usurped  by  others  that  know  not  love.  I 
like  them,  to(j,  because  they  really  seem  to 
have  an  eye  for  the  strange  beauty  and 
charm  of  the  Sphinx,  quite  an  unexpected 
taste  for  Botticelli.  They  ill-conceal  their 
envy  of  my  lot,  and  sometimes,  in  the 
meditative  pauses  between  the  courses,  I 
see  them  romantically  reckoning  how  it 
might  be  possible  by  desperately  saving  up, 
by  prodigious  windfalls  of  tips,  from  unex- 
ampled despatch  and  sweetness  in  their 
ministrations,  how  it  might  be  possible  in 
ten  years'  time,  perhaps  even  in  five  — 
the  lady  would  wait  five  years  !  and  her 
present  lover  could  be  artistically  poisoned 
meanwhile!  —  how  it  might  be  possible  to 
come  and  sue  for  her  beautiful  hand. 
Then  a  harsh  British  cry  for  'waiter' 
comes  like  a  rattle  and  scares  away  that 
beautiful  dream-bird,  though,  as  the  poor 
dreamer  speeds  on  the  quest  of  roast  beef 
for  four,  you  can  see  it  still  circling  with 
its  wonderful  blue  feathers  around  his 
pomatumed  head. 

Ah,  yes,  the  waiters  know  that  the 
Sphinx  is  no  ordinary  woman.  She  can- 
not conceal  even  from  them  the  mystical 


PROSE    FANCIES       57 

star  of  her  face,  they  too  catch  far  echoes 
of  the  strange  music  of  her  brain,  they  too 
grow  dreamy  with  dropped  hints  of  fra- 
grance from  the  rose  of  her  wonderful  heart. 

How  reverently  do  they  help  her  dofF 
her  little  cloak  of  silk  and  lace :  with 
what  a  worshipful  inclination  of  the  head, 
as  in  the  presence  of  a  deity,  do  they 
await  her  verdict  of  choice  between  rival 
soups  —  shall  it  be  'clear  or  thick'? 
And  when  she  decides  on  'thick,'  how  re- 
lieved they  seem  to  be,  as  if — well,  some 
few  matters  remain  undecided  in  the  uni- 
verse, but  never  mind,  this  is  settled  for- 
ever—  no  more  doubts  possible  on  one 
portentous  issue,  at  any  rate  —  Madame 
will  take  her  soup  '  thick.' 

'  On  such  a  night '  our  talk  fell  upon 
whitebait. 

As  the  Sphinx's  silver  fork  rustled 
among  the  withered  silver  upon  her  plate, 
she  turned  to  me  and  said  : 

'  Have  you  ever  thought  what  beautiful 
little  things  these  whitebait  are  ? ' 

'  Oh,  yes,'  I  replied,  '  they  are  the 
daisies  of  the  deep  sea,  the  threepenny- 
pieces  of  the  ocean.' 


58        PROSE    FANCIES 

'You  dear!'  said  the  Sphinx,  who  is 
alone  in  the  world  in  thinking  me  awfully 
clever.  '  Go  on,  say  something  else,  some- 
thing pretty  about  whitebait  —  there's  a 
subject  for  you!* 

'I'hen  it  was  that,  fortunately,  I  remem- 
bered my  Pre-Raphaelite  friend,  and  I 
sententiously  remarked  :  '  Of  course,  if 
one  has  anything  to  say  one  cannot  do 
better  than  to  say  it  about  whitebait. 
Well,  whitebait 

But  here,  providentially,  the  band  of 
the  beef — that  is,  the  band  behind  the 
beef;  that  is,  the  band  that  nightly  hymns 
the  beef  (the  phrase  is  to  be  had  in  three 
qualities)  —  struck  up  the  overture  from 
'  Tannhauser,'  which  is  not  the  only 
music  that  makes  the  Sphinx  forget  my  ex- 
istence -,  and  thus,  forgetting  me,  she  mo- 
mentarily forgot  the  whitebait.  But  I 
remembered,  remembered  hard  —  worked 
at  pretty  things,  as  metal  workers  punch 
out  their  flowers  of  brass  and  copper. 
The  music  swirled  about  us  like  golden 
waves,  in  which  swam  myriad  whitebait, 
like    showers    of   tiny    stars,  like    falling 


PROSE    FANCIES        59 

snow.  To  me  it  was  one  grand  proces- 
sional of  whitebait,  silver  ripples  upon 
streams  of  gold. 

The  music  stopped.  The  Sphinx 
turned  to  me  with  the  soul  of  Wagner  in 
her  eyes,  and  then  she  turned  to  the  waiter  : 
*■  Would  it  be  possible,'  she  said,  '  to  per- 
suade the  bandmaster  to  play  that  wonder- 
ful thing  over  again  ? ' 

The  waiter  seemed  a  little  doubtful, 
even  for  the  Sphinx,  but  he  went  off  to  the 
bandmaster  with  the  air  of  the  man  who 
has  at  last  an  opportunity  to  show  that  he 
can  dare  all  for  love.  Personally,  I  have 
a  suspicion  that  he  poured  his  month's  sav- 
ings at  the  bandmaster's  feet,  and  begged 
him  to  do  this  thing  for  the  most  won- 
derful lady  in  the  world;  or  perhaps  the 
bandmaster  was  really  a  musician,  and 
his  musician's  heart  was  touched  — 
lonely  there  amid  the  beef — to  think 
that  there  was  really  someone,  invisible 
though  she  were  to  him,  some  shrouded 
silver  presence,  up  there  among  the  beef- 
eaters, who  really  loved  to  hear  great 
music.     Perhaps  it  was  thus  made  a  night 


6o        PROSE    FANCIES 

he  has  never  forgotten  ;  perhaps  it  changed 
the  whole  course  of  his  life  — who  knows  ? 
The  sweet,  reassuring  request  may  have 
come  to  him  at  a  moment  when,  sick  at 
heart,  he  was  deciding  to  abandon  real 
music  forever,  and  settle  down  amid  the 
beef  and   the   beef-music  of  Old  England. 

Well,  however  it  was,  the  waiter  came 
back  radiant  with  a  '  Yes '  on  every  shin- 
ing  part  of  him,  and  if  the  ^  Tannhauser  * 
had  been  played  well  at  first,  certainly  the 
orchestra  surpassed  themselves  this  second 
time. 

When  the  great  jinnee  of  music  had 
once  more  swept  out  of  the  hall,  the 
Sphinx  turned  with  shining  eyes  to  the 
waiter  : 

'  Take,'  she  said,  '  take  these  tears  to 
the  bandmaster.  He  has  indeed  earned 
them.' 

'Tears,  little  one,'  I  said.  'See  how 
they  swim  like  whitebait  in  the  fishpools 
of  your  eyes  ! ' 

'  Oh,  yes,  the  whitebait,'  rejoined  the 
Sphinx,  glad  of  a  subject  to  hide  her  emo- 
tion.      '  Now     tell     me    something   nice 


PROSE    FANCIES       6i 

about  them^  though  the  poor  little  things 
have  long  since  disappeared.  Tell  me, 
for  instance,  how  they  get  their  beautiful 
little  silver  vi^aterproofs  ? ' 

*  Electric  Light  of  the  World,'  I  said, 
'  it  is  like  this.  While  they  are  still  quite 
young  and  full  of  dreams,  their  mother 
takes  them  out  in  picnic  parties  of  a  billion 
or  so  at  a  time  to  where  the  spring  moon 
is  shining,  scattering  silver  from  its  purse 
of  pearl  far  over  the  wide  waters — silver, 
silver  for  every  little  whitebait  that  cares  to 
swim  and  pick  it  up.  The  mother,  who  has 
a  contract  with  some  such  big  restaura- 
teur as  ours,  chooses  a  convenient  area  of 
moonlight,  and  then  at  a  given  sign  they 
all  turn  over  on  their  sides,  and  bask  and 
bask  in  the  rays,  little  fin  pressed  lov- 
ingly against  little  fin  —  for  this  is  the 
happiest  time  in  the  young  whitebait's 
life :  it  is  at  these  silvering  parties  that 
matches  are  made  and  future  consignments 
of  whitebait  arranged  for.  Well,  night 
after  night,  they  thus  lie  in  the  moonlight, 
first  on  one  side,  then  on  the  other,  till  by 
degrees,  tiny  scale  by  scale,  they  have  be- 


62        PROSE    FANCIES 

come  completely  lunar-platcd.  Ah!  how 
sad  they  arc  when  the  end  of  that  happy 
time  has  come.' 

'  And  what  happens  to  them  after 
that? '  asked  the  Sphinx. 

'  One  night  when  the  moon  is  hidden 
their  mother  comes  to  them  with  treach- 
erous wile,  and  suggests  that  they  should 
go  ofF  on  a  holiday  again  to  seek  the  moon 
—  the  moon  that  for  a  moment  seems 
captured  by  the  pearl  fishers  of  the  sky. 
And  so  off  they  go  merrily,  but,  alas,  no 
moon  appears,  and  presently  they  are 
aware  of  unwieldy  bumping  presences  upon 
the  surface  of  the  sea,  presences  as  of  huge 
dolphins,  and  rough  voices  call  across  the 
water,  till,  scared,  the  little  whitebaits  turn 
home  in  flight  —  to  find  themselves  some- 
how meshed  in  an  invisible  prison,  a  net 
as  fine  and  strong  as  air,  into  which,  O 
agony,  they  are  presently  hauled,  lovely 
banks  of  silver,  shining  like  opened  coffers 
beneath  the  coarse  and  ragged  flares  of 
yellow  torches.     The  rest  is  silence.' 

'  What  sad  little  lives !  and  what  a 
cruel  world  it  is  ! '  said  the  Sphinx  —  as  she 


PROSE    FANCIES        63 

crunched  with  her  knife  through  the  body 
of  a  lark,  that  but  yesterday  had  been  sing- 
ing in  the  blue  sky.  Its  spirit  sang  just 
above  our  heads  as  she  ate,  and  the  air 
was  thick  with  the  grey  ghosts  of  all  the 
whitebait  she  had  eaten  that  night. 

But  there  were   no  longer  any  tears  in 
her  eyes. 


PROSE     FANCIES— VI 

THE     ANSWER     OF 
THE     ROSE 


THE  Sphinx  and  I  sat  in  our  little  box 
at  Rom^'O  and  Juliet.  It  was  the  first 
time  she  had  seen  that  fairy-tale  of 
passion  upon  the  stage.  I  had  seen  it 
played  once  before — in  Paradise.  There- 
fore, I  rather  trembled  to  see  it  again  in 
an  earthly  play-house,  and  as  much  as  pos- 
sible kept  my  eyes  from  the  stage.  All  I 
knew  of  the  performance — but  how  much 
was  that  !  — was  two  lovely  voices  making 
love  like  angels  ■■,  and  when  there  were  no 
words,  the  music  told  me  what  was  going 
on.      Love  speaks  so  many  languages. 

One  might  as  well  look.  It  was  as 
clear  as  moonlight  to  the  tragic  eye  within 
the  heart.  The  Sphinx  was  gazing  on  it 
all  with  those  eyes  that  will  never  grow 
old,  neither  for  years  nor  tears;  but  though 
I  seemed  to  be  seeing  nothing  but  an  ad- 
vertisement of  Paderewski  pianos  on  the 

64 


PROSE    FANCIES       65 

programme,  I  saw  it  —  O  did  n't  I  see  it? 
—  all.  The  house  had  grown  dark,  and 
the  music  low  and  passionate,  and  for  a 
moment  no  one  was  speaking.  Only, 
deep  in  the  thickets  of  my  heart,  there 
sang  a  tragic  nightingale  that,  happily, 
only  I  could  hear;  and  I  said  to  myself, 
'  Now  the  young  fool  is  climbing  the  or- 
chard wall !  Yes,  there  go  Benvolio  and 
Mercutio  calling  him;  and  now — 'he 
jests  at  scars  who  never  felt  a  wound ' — 
the  other  young  fool  is  coming  out  on  to 
the  balcony.  God  help  them  both  !  They 
have  no  eyes  —  no  eyes  —  or  surely  they 
would  see  the  shadow  that  sings  "  Love  ! 
Love !  Love ! "  like  a  fountain  in  the 
moonlight,  and  then  shrinks  away  to 
chuckle  "  Death  !  Death  !  Death  !  "  in  the 
darkness  ! * 

But,  soft,  what  light  from  yonder  win- 
dow breaks  ! 

The  Sphinx  turned  to  me  for  sympathy 
— this  time  it  was  the  soul  of  Shakespeare 
in  her  eyes. 

'Yes!'  I  whispered,  'it  is  the  Opening 
of  the  Eternal  Rose,  sung  by  the  Eternal 
Nightingale  ! ' 


66       PROSE    FANCIES 

She  pressed  my  hand  approvingly  ;  and 
while  the  lovely  voices  made  their  heav- 
enly love,  I  slipped  out  my  silver-bound 
pocket-book  of  ivory  and  pressed  within  it 
the  rose  which  had  just  fallen  from  my 
lips. 

The  worst  of  a  great  play  is  that  one  is 
so  dull  between  the  acts.  Wit  is  sacri- 
lege, and  sentiment  is  bathos.  Not  an- 
other rose  fell  from  my  lips  during  the 
performance,  though  that  I  minded  little,  as 
I  was  the  more  able  to  count  the  pearls  that 
fell  from  the  Sphinx's  eyes. 

It  took  quite  half  a  bottle  of  champagne 
to  pull  us  up  to  our  usual  spirits,  as  we  sat 
at  supper  at  a  window  where  we  could 
see  London  spread  out  beneath  us  like  a 
huge  black  velvet  flower,  dotted  with  fiery 
embroideries,  sudden  flaring  stamens,  and 
rows  of  ant-like  fireflies  moving  in  slow 
zig-zag  processions  along  and  across  its 
petals. 

'  How  strange  it  seems,'  said  the  Sphinx, 
*■  to  think  that  for  every  two  of  those  mov- 
ing double-lights,  which  we  know  to  be 
the  eyes  of  hansoms,  but  which  seem  up 
here  nothing  but  gold  dots  in  a  very  bar- 


PROSE    FANCIES       67 

baric  pattern  of  black  and  gold,  there  are 
two  human  beings,  no  doubt,  at  this  time 
of  night  —  two  lovers,  throbbing  with  the 
joy  of  life,  and  dreaming,  heaven  knows 
what  dreams. 

'  Yes,'  I  rejoined  ;  '  and  to  them  I  'm 
afraid  we  are  even  more  impersonal. 
From  their  little  Piccadilly  coracles  our 
watch-tower  in  the  skies  is  merely  a  radi- 
ant fagade  of  glowing  windows,  and  no 
one  of  all  who  glide  by  realises  that  the 
spirited  illumination  is  every  bit  due  to 
your  eyes.  You  have  but  to  close  them, 
and  every  one  will  be  asking  what  has 
gone  wrong  with  the  electric  lights.' 

A  little  nonsense  is  a  great  healer  of  the 
heart,  and  by  means  of  such  nonsense  as 
this  we  grew  merry  again.  And  anon  we 
grew  sentimental  and  poetic,  but — thank 
heaven!  we  were  no  longer  tragic. 

Presently  I  had  news  for  the  Sphinx. 
'  The  rose-tree  that  grows  in  the  garden 
of  my  mind,'  I   said,  'desires  to  blossom.' 

'  May  it  blossom  indeed,'  she  replied; 
'  for  it  has  been  flowerless  all  this  long 
evening ;  and  bring  me  a  rose  fresh  with 
all  the  dews   of  inspiration  —  no  florist's 


68        PROSE    FANCIES 

flower,  wired  and  artificially  scented  —  no 
bloom  of  yesterday's  hard-driven  brains.' 

'■I  was  only  thinking,'  I  said,  '■a  propos 
of  nightingales  and  roses,  that  though  all 
the  world  has  heard  the  song  of  the  night- 
ingale to  the  rose,  only  the  nightingale  has 
heard  the  answer  of  the  rose.  You  know 
what  I  mean  ? ' 

'  Know  what  you  mean!  Of  course, 
that 's  always  easy  enough,'  retorted  the 
Sphinx,  who  knows  well  how  to  be  hard 
on  me. 

'  I  'm  so  glad,'  I  ventured  to  thrust 
back  ;  *  for  lucidity  is  the  first  success  of 
expression :  to  make  others  see  clearly 
what  we  ourselves  are  struggling  to  see, 
believe  with  all  their  hearts  what  we  are 
just  daring  to  hope,  is —  well,  the  religion 
of  a  literary  man!  ' 

*  Yes,  it 's  a  pretty  idea,'  said  the  Sphinx, 
once  more  pressing  the  rose  of  my  thought 
to  her  brain  ;  'and,  indeed,  it's  more  than 
pretty.   .   .   .' 

'Thank  you!'  I  said  humbly. 

'  Yes,  it 's  true  —  and  many  a  humble 
little  rose  will  thank  you  for  it.  For, 
your  nightingale  is  a  self-advertising   bird. 


PROSE    FANCIES       69 

He  never  sings  a  song  without  an  eye  on 
the  critics,  sitting  up  there  in  their  stalls 
among  the  stars.  He  never,  or  seldom, 
sings  a  song  for  pure  love,  just  because 
he  must  sing  it  or  die.  Indeed,  he  has  a 
great  fear  of  death,  unless — you  will  guar- 
antee him  immortality.  But  the  rose,  the 
trusting  little  earth-born  rose,  that  must 
stay  all  her  life  rooted  in  one  spot  till  some 
nightingale  comes  to  choose  her — some 
nightingale  whose  song  maybe  has  been 
inspired  and  perfected  by  a  hundred  other 
roses,  which  are  at  the  moment  pot-pourri 
— ah,  the  shy  bosom-song  of  the  rose   .   .   .' 

Here  the  Sphinx  paused,  and  added  ab- 
ruptly— 

'  Well,  there  is  no  nightingale  worthy 
to  hear  it!' 

'  It  is  true,'  I  agreed,  '  O  trusting,  little 
earth-born  rose  ! ' 

*  Do  you  know  why  the  rose  has  thorns  ?  * 
suddenly  asked  the  Sphinx.  Of  course  I 
knew,  but  I  always  respect  a  joke,  par- 
ticularly when  it  is  but  half-born  — 
humourists  always  prefer  to  deliver  them- 
selves —  so  I  shook  my  head. 

'  To  keep  off  the  nightingales,  of  course,* 


70        PROSE    FANCIES 

said  the  Sphinx,  the  tone  of  her  voice 
holding  in  mocking  solution  the  words 
'  Donkcv'  and  'Stupid,' — which  I  rec- 
ognized and  meekly  bore. 

*  What  an  excellent  idea  ! '  I  said.  '  I 
never  thought  of  it  before.  But  don't  you 
think  it  's  a  little  unkind  ?  For,  after  all, 
if  there  were  no  nightingales,  one  should  n't 
hear  so  much  about  the  rose  ;  and  there  is 
always  the  danger  that  if  the  rose  continues 
too  painfully  thorny,  the  nightingale  may 
go  off  and  seek,  say,  a  more  accommo- 
dating lily.' 

'  I  have  no  opinion  of  lilies,'  said  the 
Sphinx. 

'  Nor  have  I,'  I  answered  soothingly, 
'I  much  prefer  roses  —  but  .  .  . 
but   .   .   .' 

'  But  what  ?' 

'But  —  well,  I  much  prefer  roses. 
Indeed  I  do.' 

'  Rose  of  the  World,'  I  continued  with 
sentiment,  '  draw  in  your  thorns.  I  can- 
not bear  them.' 

'Ah!'  she  answered  eagerly,  'that  is 
just  it.  The  nightingale  that  is  worthy  of 
the  rose  will  not  only  bear,  but  positively 


PROSE    FANCIES       71 

love,  her  thorns.  It  is  for  that  reason 
she  wears  them.  The  thorns  of  the 
rose  properly  understood  are  but  the 
tests  of  the  nightingale.  The  nightingale 
that  is  frightened  of  the  thorns  is  not 
worthy  of  the  rose  —  of  that  you  may  be 
sure ' 

'  I  am  not  frightened  of  the  thorns,'  I 
managed  to  interject. 

'  Sing  then  once  more,'  she  cried,  '  the 
Song  of  the  Nightingale.' 

And  it  was  thus  I  sang  : — 

0  Rose  of  the  World,  a  nightingale, 
A  Bird  of  the  World,  am  I, 

1  have  loved  all  the  world  and  sung  all  the  world, 

But  I  come  to  your  side  to  die. 

Tired  of  the  world,  as  the  world  of  me, 

I  plead  for  your  quiet  breast, 
I  have  loved  all  the  world  and  sung  all  the  world  — 

But  —  where  is  the  nightingale's  nest  ? 

In  a  hundred  gardens  I  sung  the  rose, 

Rose  of  the  World,  I  confess  — 
But  for  every  rose  I  have  sung  before 

I  love  you  the  more,  not  less. 

Perfect  it  grew  by  each  rose  that  died. 

Each  rose  that  has  died  for  you, 
The  song  that  I  sing  —  yea, 'tis  no  new  song, 

It  is  tried  —  and  so  it  is  true. 


72        PROSE    FANCIES 

Petal  or  thorn,  yea  !   I  have  no  care, 

So  that  I  here  abide. 
Pierce  me,  my  love,  or  luss  me,  my  love, 

But  keep  me  close  to  your  side. 

I  know  not  your  kiss  from  your  scorn,  my  love, 
Your  breast  from  your  thorn,  my  rose. 

And  if  you  must  kill  me,  well,  kill  me,  my  love  ! 
But  —  say  "t  was  the  death  I   chose. 

'  Is  it  true  .?'  asked  the  Rose. 

*  As  1  am  a  nightingale,*  1  replied  ;  and 
as  we  bade  each  other  good-night,  I 
whispered  : 

'  When  may  I  expect  the  Answer  of  the 
Rose  ?  • 


PROSE   FANCIES— VII 


ABOUT      THE      SE 
CURITIES 


WHEN  I  say  that  my  friend  Mat- 
thew lay  dying,  I  want  you  so 
far  as  possible  to  dissociate  the 
statement  from  any  conventional,  and  cer- 
tainly from  any  pictorial,  conceptions  of 
death  which  you  may  have  acquired. 
Death  sometimes  shows  himself  one  of 
those  impersonal  artists  who  conceal  their 
art,  and,  unless  you  had  been  told,  you 
could  hardly  have  guessed  that  Matthew 
was  dying,  dying  indeed  sixty  miles  an 
hour,  dying  of  consumption,  dying  because 
some  one  else  had  died  four  years  before, 
dying,  too,  of  debt. 

Connoisseurs,  of  course,  would  have 
understood ;  at  a  glance  would  have 
named  the  sculptor  who  was  silently 
chiselling  those  noble  hollows  in  the 
finely  modelled  face — that  Pygmalion 
who  turns  all  flesh  to  stone  —  at  a  glance 

73 


74       PROSE    FANCIES 

would  have  named  the  painter  who  was 
cunningly  weighting  the  brows  with  dark- 
ness that  the  eyes  might  shine  the  more 
with  an  unaccustomed  light.  Matthew 
and  I  had  long  been  students  of  the  strange 
wandering  artist,  had  begun  by  hating  his 
art  (it  is  ever  so  with  an  art  unfamiliar  to 
us)    and  had  »  ndcd  by  loving  it. 

*■  Let  us  see  what  the  artist  has  added 
to  the  picture  since  yesterday,'  said  Mat- 
thew, signing  to  me  to  hand  him  the 
mirror. 

'  H'm,'  he  murmured,  '  he's  had  one 
of  his  lazy  days,  I'm  afraid.  He's  hardly 
added  a  touch — just  a  little  heightened 
the  chiaroscuro,  sharpened  the  nose  a  trifle, 
deepened  some  little  the  shadows  round 
the  eyes     .     .     .' 

'  O  why,'  he  presently  sighed,  '  does 
he  not  work  a  little  overtime  and  get  it 
done .?  He's  been  paid  handsomely 
enough     .     .     ." 

'  Paid,'  he  continued,  'by  a  life  that  is 
so  much  undeveloped  gold-mine,  paid  by 
all  my  uncashed  hopes  and  dreams    .    .     .' 

*  He  works  fast  enough  for  me,  old  fel- 


PROSE    FANCIES       75 

low,'  I  interrupted,  '  there  was  a  time,  was 
there  not,  when  he  worked  too  fast  for 
you  and  me  ?  * 

There  are  moments,  for  certain  people, 
when  such  fantastic  unreality  as  this  is  the 
truest  realism.  Matthew  and  I  talked  like 
this  with  our  brains,  because  we  hadn't 
the  courage  to  allow  our  hearts  to  break 
in  upon  the  conversation.  Had  I  dared  to 
say  some  real  emotional  thing,  what  effect 
would  it  have  had  but  to  set  poor  tired 
Matthew  a-coughing  ?  and  it  was  our  aim 
that  he  should  die  with  as  little  to-do  as 
practicable.  The  emotional  in  such  situa- 
tions is  merely  the  obvious.  There  was 
no  need  for  either  of  us  to  state  the  elem- 
entary feelings  of  our  love.  I  knew  that 
Matthew  was  going  to  die,  and  he  knew 
that  —  I  was  going  to  live  ;  and  we  pitied 
each  other  accordingly,  though  I  confess 
my  feeling  for  him  was  rather  one  of 
envy  —  when   it  was  not   congratulation. 

Thus,  to  tell  the  truth,  we  never  men- 
tioned '  the  hereafter.'  I  don't  believe  it 
even  occurred  to  us.  Indeed,  we  spent 
the  few  hours  that  remained  of  our  friend- 


76        PROSE    FANCIES 

ship  in  retailing  the  latest  gathered  of  those 
good  stories  with  which  we  had  been  ac- 
customed to  salt  our  intercourse. 

One  of  Matthew's  anecdotes  was,  no 
doubt,  somewhat  suggested  by  the  occa- 
sion, and  I  should  add  that  he  had  always 
somewhat  of  an  ecclesiastical  bias,  and 
would,  I  believe,  have  ended  some  day  as  a 
Monsignor,  a  notable  '  Bishop  Blougram.' 

His  story  was  of  an  evangelistic 
preacher  who  desired  to  impress  his  con- 
gregation with  the  unmistakable  reality  of 
hell-fire,  '  You  know  the  Black  Country, 
my  friends,'  he  had  declaimed,  'you  have 
seen  it,  at  night,  flaring  with  a  thousand 
furnaces,  in  the  lurid  incandescence  of 
which  myriads  of  unhappy  beings,  our 
fellow-creatures  (God  forbid  !  )  snatch  a 
precarious  existence,  you  have  seen  them 
silhouetted  against  the  yellow  glare,  run- 
ning hither  and  thither  as  it  seemed  from 
afar,  in  the  very  jaws  of  the  awful  fire. 
Have  you  realized  that  the  burdens  with 
which  they  thus  run  hither  and  thither 
are  molten  iron,  iron  to  which  such  a 
stupendous  heat  has  been  applied  that  it 
has  melted,  melted  as  though  it  had  been 


PROSE    FANCIES        77 

sugar  in  the  sun  —  well !  returning  to  hell- 
fire,  let  me  tell  you  this,  that  in  hell  they 
eat  this  fiery  molten  metal  for  ice-cream! 
yes !  and  are  glad  to  get  anything  so  cool.' 

It  was  thus  we  talked  while  Matthew 
lay  dying,  for  why  should  we  not  talk  as 
we  had  lived  ?  We  both  laughed  long 
and  heartily  over  this  story,  perhaps  it 
would  have  amused  us  less  had  Matthew 
not  been  dying ;  and  then  his  kind  old 
nurse  brought  in  our  lunch.  We  had 
both  excellent  appetites,  and  were  far  from 
indifferent  to  the  dainty  little  meal  which 
was  to  be  our  last  but  one  together.  I 
brought  my  table  as  close  to  Matthew's 
pillow  as  was  possible,  and  he  stroked  my 
hand  with  tenderness  in  which  there  was  a 
touch  of  gratitude. 

*  You  are  not  frightened  of  the  bacteria ! ' 
he  laughed  sadly,  and  then  he  told  me, 
with  huge  amusement,  how  a  friend  (and 
a  true,  dear  friend  for  all  that)  had  come 
to  see  him  a  day  or  two  before,  and  had 
hung  over  the  end  of  the  bed  to  say  fare- 
well, daring  to  approach  no  nearer,  mop- 
ping his  fear-perspiring  brows  with  a 
handkerchief  soaked  in  '  Eucalyptus  ' ! 


78       PROSE    FANCIES 

'  He  had  brought  an  anticipatory  elegy, 
too,'  said  my  friend,  '  written  against  my 
burial.  I  wish  you  'd  read  it  for  me,'  and 
he  fidgeted  for  it  in  the  nervous  manner 
of  the  dying.  Finding  it  among  his 
pillows,  he  handed  it  to  me  saying,  'you 
need  n't  be  frightened  of  it.  It  is  well 
dosed  with  Eucalyptus.' 

We  laughed  even  more  over  this  poem 
than  over  our  stories,  and  then  we  dis- 
cussed the  terms  of  three  cremation  socie- 
ties to  which,  at  the  express  request  of  my 
friend,  I  had  written  a  day  or  two  before. 

Then  having  smoked  a  cigar  and  drunk 
a  glass  of  port  together  (for  the  assured 
dying  are  allowed  to  '  live  well '),  Matthew 
grew  sleepy,  and  tucking  him  beneath  the 
counterpane,  I  left  him,  for,  after  all,  he 
was  not  to  die  that  day. 

Circumstances  prevented  my  seeing  him 
again  for  a  week.  When  I  did  so,  entering 
the  room  poignantly  redolent  of  the  strange 
sweet  odour  of  antiseptics,  I  saw  that  the 
great  artist  had  been  busy  in  my  absence. 
Indeed,  his  work  was  nearly  at  end.  Yet 
to  one  unfamiliar  with  his  methods,  there 
was  still  little  to  alarm  in  Matthew's  face. 


PROSE    FANCIES       79 

In  fact,  with  the  exception  of  his  brain, 
and  his  ice-cold  feet,  he  was  alive  as  ever. 
And  even  to  his  brain  had  come  a  certain 
unnatural  activity,  a  life  as  of  the  grave,  a 
sort  of  vampire  vitality,  which  would  as- 
suredly have  deceived  any  who  had  not 
known  him.  He  still  told  his  stories, 
laughed  and  talked  with  the  same  uncon- 
querable humour,  was  in  every  way  alert 
and  practical,  with  this  difference,  that  he 
had  forgotten  he  was  going  to  die,  that  the 
world  in  which  he  exercised  his  various 
faculties  was  another  world  to  that  in 
which,  in  spite  of  his  delirium,  we  ate  our 
last  boiled  fowl,  drank  our  last  wine, 
smoked  our  last  cigar  together.  His  talk 
was  so  convincingly  rational,  dealt  with 
such  unreal  matters  in  so  every-day  a 
fashion, that  you  were  ready  to  think  that 
surely  it  was  you  and  not  he  whose  mind 
was  wandering. 

'  You  might  reach  that  pocket-book,  and 
ring  for  Mrs.  Davies,'  he  would  say  in  so 
casual  a  way  that  of  course  you  would 
ring.  On  Mrs.  Davies's  appearance  he 
would  be  fumbling  about  among  the  papers 
in  his  pocket-book,  and  presently  he  would 


8o        PROSE    FANCIES 

say,  with  a  look  of  frustration  that  went 
to  one's  heart — '  I  've  got  a  ten-pound 
note  somewhere  here  for  you,  Mrs.  Uavies, 
to  pay  you  up  till  Saturday,  but  somehow 
I  seem  to  have  lost  it.  Yet  it  must  be 
somewhere  about.  Perhaps  you  '11  find  it 
as  you  make  the  bed  in  the  morning.  I'm 
so  sorry  to  have  troubled  you.     .     .     .* 

And  then  he  would  grow  tired  and  doze 
a  little  on  his  pillow. 

Suddenly  he  would  be  alert  again,  and 
with  a  startling  vividness  tell  me  strange 
stories  from  the  dreamland  into  which  he 
was  now  passing. 

I  had  promised  to  see  him  on  Mon- 
day, but  had  been  prevented,  and  had 
wired  to  him  accordingly.  This  was 
Tuesday. 

*  You  need  n't  have  troubled  to  wire,' 
he  said.  '  Did  n't  you  know  I  was  in 
London  from  Saturday  to  Monday  ?  ' 

*  The  doctor  and  Mrs.  Davies  did  n't 
know,'  he  continued,  with  the  creepy 
cunning  of  the  dying,  '  I  managed  to  slip 
away  to  look  at  a  house  I  think  of  taking 
—  in  fact  I've  taken  it.  It's  in  —  in  — 
now,  where  is  it  ?      Now  is  n't  that  silly  ? 


PROSE    FANCIES       8i 

I  can  see  it  as  plain  as  anything — yet  I 
cannot,  for  the  Hfe  of  me,  remember 
where  it  is,  or  the  number.  ...  It 
was  somewhere  St.  John's  Wood  way 
.  never  mind,  you  must  come  and 
see  me  there,  when  we  get  in.    .      .      .' 

I  said  he  was  dying  in  debt,  and  thus 
the  heaven  that  lay  about  his  death-bed 
was  one  of  fantastic  Eldorados,  sudden 
colossal  legacies,  and  miraculous  windfalls. 

'  I  have  n't  told  you,'  he  said  presently, 
'  of  the  piece  of  good  luck  that  has  befallen 
me.  You  are  not  the  only  person  in  luck. 
I  can  hardly  expect  you  to  believe  me,  it 
sounds  so  much  like  the  Arabian  nights. 
However,  it's  true  for  all  that.  Well,  one 
of  the  little  sisters  was  playing  in  the  gar- 
den a  few  afternoons  ago,  making  mud- 
pies  or  something  of  that  sort,  and  she 
suddenly  scraped  up  a  sovereign.  Pres- 
ently she  found  two  or  three  more,  and 
our  curiosity  becoming  aroused,  a  turn  or 
two  with  the  spade  revealed  quite  a  bed  of 
gold,  and  the  end  of  it  was  that  on  further 
excavating,  the  whole  garden  proved  to  be 
one  mass  of  sovereigns.  Sixty  thousand 
pounds  we  counted  .  .   .  and   then,  what 


82       PROSE    ?^  A  N  C  I  E  S 

do  you  think  —  it  suddenly  melted   away. 

•        •        • 

He  paused  for  a  moment,  and  continued, 
more  in  amusement  than  regret  — 

*  Yes  —  the  government  got  wind  of  it, 
and  claimed  the  whole  lot  as  treasure- 
trove  ! ' 

*■  But  not,'  he  added  slyly,  '  before  I  'd 
paid  off  two  or  three  of  my  biggest  bills. 
Yes — and — you  '11  keep  it  quiet,  of  course, 
there  's  another  lot  been  discovered  in  the 
garden,  but  we  shall  take  good  care  the 
government  doesn't  get  hold  of  it  this 
time,  you  bet.' 

He  told  this  wild  story  with  such  an  air 
of  simple  conviction  that,  odd  as  it  may 
seem,  one  believed  every  word  of  it.  But 
the  tale  of  his  sudden  good  fortune  was 
not  ended. 

'  You  've  heard  of  old  Lord  Osterley,' 
he  presently  began  again.  '  Well,  con- 
gratulate me,  old  man,  he  has  just  died 
and  left  everything  to  me.  You  know 
what  a  splendid  library  he  had — to  think 
that  that  will  all  be  mine — and  that  grand 
old  park  through  which  we  've  so  often 
wandered,   you   and    I.     Well,  we    shall 


PROSE    FANCIES       83 

need  fear  no  gamekeeper  now,  and  of 
course,  dear  old  fellow,  you  '11  come  and 
live  with  me — like  a  prince — and  just 
write  your  own  books  and  say  farewell  to 
journalism  forever.  Of  course,  I  can 
hardly  believe  it 's  true  yet.  It  seems  too 
much  of  a  dream, and  yet  there's  no  doubt 
about  it.  I  had  a  letter  from  my  solicit- 
ors this  morning,  saying  that  they  were 
engaged  in  going  through  the  securities, 
and — and — but  the  letter  's  somewhere 
over  there,  you  might  read  it.  No? 
Can't  you  find  it .?  It 's  there  somewhere 
about,  I  know.  Never  mind,  you  can  see 
it  again  .   .   .  '  he  finished  wearily. 

'  Yes  ! '  he  presently  said,  half  to  him- 
self, '  it  will  be  a  wonderful  change  !  a 
wonderful  change  ! ' 

At  length  the  time  came  to  say  good- 
bye, a  good-bye  I  knew  must  be  the  last, 
for  my  affairs  were  taking  me  so  far  away 
from  him  that  I  could  not  hope  to  see  him 
for  some  days. 

'  I  'm  afraid,  old  man,'  I  said,  '  that  I 
mayn't  be  able  to  see  you  for  another 
week.' 

'  O  never  mind,  old  fellow,  don't  worry 


84       PROSE    FANCIES 

about  me.  I  'm  much  better  now — and 
by  the  time  you  come  again  we  shall  know 
all  about  the  securities.' 

The  securities!  My  heart  had  seemed 
like  a  stone,  incapable  of  feeling,  all  those 
last  unreal  hours  together,  but  the  pathos  of 
that  sad  phrase  so  curiously  symbolic,  sud- 
denly smote  it  with  overwhelming  pity, 
and  the  tears  sprang  to  my  eyes  for  the 
first  time. 

As  I  bent  over  him  to  kiss  his  poor 
damp  forehead,  and  press  his  hand  for  the 
last  farewell,  I  murmured — 

*  Yes — dear,  dear  old  friend.  Wc  shall 
know  all  about  the  securities  .   .  .' 


PROSE   FANCIES— VIII 


THE       BOOM       IN 
YELLOW 


GREEN  must  always  have  a  large 
following  among  artists  and  art 
lovers ;  for,  as  has  been  pointed 
out,  an  appreciation  of  it  is  a  sure  sign  of 
a  subtle  artistic  temperament.  There  is 
something  not  quite  good,  something 
almost  sinister,  about  it — at  least,  in  its 
more  complex  forms,  though  in  its  simple 
form,  as  we  find  it  in  outdoor  nature,  it  is 
innocent  enough ;  and,  indeed,  is  it  not 
used  in  colloquial  metaphor  as  an  adjective 
for  innocence  itself  ?  Innocence  has  but 
two  colours,  white  or  green.  But  Becky 
Sharp's  eyes  also  were  green,  and  the  green 
of  the  aesthete  does  not  suggest  innocence. 
There  will  always  be  wearers  of  the  green 
carnation ;  but  the  popular  vogue  which 
green  has  enjoyed  for  the  last  ten  or 
fifteen  years  is  probably  passing.  Even 
the  aesthete   himself  would  seem    to    be 

85 


86        PROSE    FANCIES 

growing  a  little  weary  of  its  indefinitely 
divided  tones,  and  to  be  anxious  for  a 
colour  sensation  somewhat  more  positive 
than  those  to  be  gained  from  almost  im- 
perceptible nuances  of  green.  Jaded  with 
over-refinements  and  super-subtleties,  we 
seem  in  many  directions  to  be  harking  back 
to  the  primary  colours  of  life.  Blue,  crude 
and  unsoftened,  and  a  form  of  magenta, 
have  recently  had  a  short  innings ;  and 
now  the  triumph  of  yellow  is  imminent. 
Of  course,  a  love  for  green  implies  some 
regard  for  yellow,  and  in  our  so-called 
aesthetic  renaissance  the  sunflower  went 
before  the  green  carnation — which  is, 
indeed,  the  badge  of  but  a  small  schism  of 
aesthetes,  and  not  worn  by  the  great  body 
of  the  more  catholic  lovers  of  beauty. 

Yellow  is  becoming  more  and  more 
dominant  in  decoration — in  wall-papers, 
and  flowers  cultivated  with  decorative 
intention,  such  as  chrysanthemurns.  And 
one  can  easily  understand  why :  seeing 
that,  after  white,  yellow  reflects  more 
light  than  any  other  colour,  and  thus  min- 
isters to  the  growing  preference  for  light 
and  joyous  rooms.     A  {QVf  yellow  chrys- 


PROSE    FANCIES       87 

anthemums  will  make  a  small  room  look 
twice  its  size,  and  when  the  sun  comes  out 
upon  a  yellow  wall-paper  the  whole  room 
seems  suddenly  to  expand,  to  open  like  a 
flower.  When  it  falls  upon  the  pot  of 
yellow  chrysanthemums,  and  sets  them 
ablaze,  it  seems  as  though  one  had  an 
angel  in  the  room.  Bill-posters  are  be- 
ginning to  discover  the  attractive  qualities 
of  the  colour.  Who  can  ever  forget 
meeting  for  the  first  time  upon  a  hoarding 
Mr.  Dudley  Hardy's  wonderful  Yellow 
Girl,  the  pretty  advance  guard  of  To-Day  ? 
But  I  suppose  the  honour  of  the  discovery 
of  the  colour  for  advertising  purposes  rests 
with  Mr.  Colman  ;  though  its  recent  boom 
comes  from  the  publishers,  and  particularly 
from  the  Bodley  Head.  The  Tellorv  Book 
with  any  other  colour  would  hardly  have 
sold  as  well — the  first  private  edition  of 
Mr.  Arthur  Benson's  poems  by  the  way, 
came  caparisoned  in  yellow,  and  with  the 
identical  name,  Le  Cahier  "Jaune ;  and  no 
doubt  it  was  largely  its  title  that  made  the 
success  of  The  Tellow  Aster.  In  literature, 
indeed,  yellow  has  long  been  the  colour  of 
romance.     The  word  '  yellow-back  '   wit- 


88        PROSE    FANCIES 

nesses  its  close  association  with  fiction ; 
and  in  France,  as  we  know,  it  is  the  all 
but  universal  custom  to  bind  books  in 
yellow  paper.  Mr.  Heinemann  and  Mr. 
Unwin  have  endeavoured  to  naturalise  the 
custom  here  ;  but,  though  in  cloth  yellow 
has  emphatically  '  caught  on,'  in  paper  it 
still  hangs  fire.  The  ABC  Railway 
Guide  is  probably  the  only  exception,  and 
that,  it  is  to  be  hoped,  is  not  fiction,  Mr, 
Lang  has  recently  followed  the  fashion 
with  his  Tellow  Fairy  Book;  and,  indeed, 
one  of  the  best  known  figures  in  fairydom 
is  yellow — namely,  the  Yellow  Dwarf, 
Yellow,  always  a  prominent  Oriental 
colour,  was  but  lately  of  peculiar  signifi- 
cance in  the  Far  East;  for  were  not  the 
sorrows  of  a  certain  high  Chinese  official 
intimately  connected  with  the  fatal  colour  ? 
The  Yellow  Book,  the  Yellow  Aster,  the 
Yellow  Jacket  ! — and  the  Yellow  Fever, 
like  '  Orion  '  Home's  sunshine,  is  always 
with  us  '  somewhere  in  the  world,'  The 
same  applies  also,  I  suppose,  to  the  Yellow 
Sea, 

Till  one  comes  to  think  of  it,  one  hardly 
realises  how  many  important  and  pleasant 


PROSE    FANCIES       89 

things  in  life  are  yellow.  Blue  and  green, 
no  doubt,  contract  for  the  colouring  of 
vast  departments  of  the  physical  world. 
'  Blue  !'  sings  Keats,  in  a  fine  but  too  little 
known  sonnet — 

*.    .   .   'Tis  the  life  of  heaven — the  domain 

Of  Cynthia — the  wide  palace  of  the  sun — 
The  tent  of  Hesperus,  and  all  his  train — 
The  bosomer  of  clouds,  gold,  grey,  and  dun. 
Blue  !      'Tis  the  life  of  waters  .    .    . 
Blue  !      Gentle  cousin  of  the  forest  green, 
Married  to  green  in  all  the  sweetest  flowers.' 

Yellow  might  retort  by  quoting  Mr. 
Grant  Allen,  in  his  book  on  The  Colour 
Sense,  to  the  effect  that  the  blueness  of  sea 
and  sky  is  mainly  poetical  illusion  or  inac- 
curacy, and  that  sea  and  sky  are  found 
blue  only  in  one  experiment  out  of  four- 
teen. At  morning  and  evening  they  are 
usually  in  great  part  stained  golden.  Blue 
certainly  has  one  advantage  over  yellow;  in 
that  it  has  the  privilege  of  colouring  some 
of  the  prettiest  eyes  in  the  world.  Yellow 
has  a  chance  only  in  cases  of  jaundice 
and  liver  complaint,  and  his  colour  scheme 
in  such  cases  is  seldom  appreciated. 
Again,  green  has  the  contract  for  the 
greater  bulk  of  the  vegetable  life   of  the 


90       PROSE    FANCIES 

globe  ;  but  his  is  a  monotonous  business, 
like  the  painting  of  miles  and  miles  of  pal- 
ings, grass,  grass,  grass,  trees,  trees,  trees, 
ad  infinitum ;  whereas  yellow  leads  a  rov- 
ing versatile  life,  and  is  seldom  called  upon 
for  such  monotonous  labour.  The  sands 
of  Sahara  are  probably  the  only  conspicu- 
ous instance  of  yellow  thus  working  by 
the  piece.  It  is  in  the  quality,  in  the  di- 
versity of  the  things  it  colours,  rather  than 
in  their  mileage  or  tonnage,  that  yellow  is 
distinguished  ;  though  for  that  matter,  we 
suppose,  the  sun  is  as  big  and  heavy  as 
most  things,  and  that  is  yellow.  Of 
course,  when  we  say  yellow  we  include 
golden,  and  all  varieties  of  the  colour — saf- 
fron, orange,  flaxen,  tawny,  blonde,  topaz, 
citron,  etc. 

If  the  sun  mav  reasonably  be  described 
as  the  most  important  object  in  the  world, 
surely  money  is  the  next.  That,  as  we 
know,  is,  in  its  most  potent  metallic  form, 
yellow  also.  The  'yellow  gold'  is  a  fa- 
vourite phrase  in  certain  forms  of  poetrv  ; 
and  '  yellow-boys '  is  a  term  of  natural 
affection  among  sailors.  Following  the 
example  of  their   lord   the  sun,  most  fires 


PROSE    FANCIES       91 

and  lights  are  yellow  or  golden,  and  it  is 
only  in  times  of  danger  or  superstition  that 
they  burn  red  or  blue.  And,  if  yellow  be 
denied  entrance  to  beautiful  eyes,  it  enjoys 
a  privilege  which — except  in  the  case  of 
certain  indigo-staining  African  tribes,  who 
cannot  be  said  to  count — blue  has  never 
claimed,  that  of  colouring  perhaps  the 
loveliest  thing  in  the  world,  the  hair  of 
woman.  Hair  is  naturally  golden — unnatu- 
rally also.  When  Browning  sings  pathetic- 
ally of  '  dear  dead  women — with  such 
hair  too ! '  he  continues: — 

'  What 's  become  of  all  the  gold 
Used  to  hang  and  brush  their  bosoms ' — 

not  '  all  the  blue  '  or  '•  all  the  brown,' 
though  some  of  us,  it  is  true,  are  con- 
demned to  wear  our  hair  brown  or  blue- 
black.  But  such  are  only  unhappy  excep- 
tions. Yellow  or  gold  is  the  rule.  The 
bravest  men  and  the  fairest  women  have 
had  golden  hair,  and,  we  may  add,  in  ref- 
erence to  another  distinction  of  the  colour 
we  are  celebrating,  golden  hearts.  Hair 
at  the  present  time  is  doing  its  best  to  con- 
form to  its  normal  conditions  of  colour. 
Numerous  instances  might  be  adduced  of 


92       PROSE    FANCIES 

its  changing  from  black  to  gold,  in  obedi- 
ence to  chemical  law.  '  Peroxide  of  hy- 
drogen !  '  says  the  cynic.  '  Beauty  ! '  says 
the  lover  of  art. 

And  it  might  be  argued,  in  a  world  of 
inevitable  compromise,  that  the  damage 
done  to  the  physical  health  and  texture  of 
the  hair  thus  playing  the  chameleon  may 
well  be  overbalanced  by  the  happiness, 
and  consequent  increased  effectiveness,  of 
the  person  thus  dyeing  for  the  sake  of 
beauty.  Thaumaturgists  lay  much  stress 
on  the  mystic  influence  of  colours  ;  and 
who  knows  but  that  if  we  were  only 
allowed  to  dye  our  hair  what  color  we 
chose,  we  might  be  different  men  and 
women.  Strange  things  are  told  of  women 
who  have  dyed  their  hair  the  color  of 
blood  or  of  wine,  and  we  know  from 
Christina  Rossctti  that  golden  hair  is  nego- 
tiable in  fairyland  — 

•  "  You  have  much  gold  upon  your  head," 

They  answered  all  together ; 

"  Buy  from  us  with  a  golden  curl." 

Whether  Laura  could  have  done  busi- 
ness with  the  goblin  merchantmen  with 
an  oxidized  curl   is   a  difficult  point,  for 


PROSE    FANCIES       93 

fairies  have  sharp  eyes ;  and  though  it 
be  impossible  for  a  mortal  to  tell  the  real 
gold  from  the  false  gold  hair,  the  fairies 
may  be  able  to  do  so,  and  might  reject  the 
curl  as  counterfeit. 

Again,  if  in  the  vegetable  world  green 
almost  universally  colours  the  leaves,  yel- 
low^ has  more  to  do  with  the  flowers.  The 
flowers  we  love  best  are  yellow  :  the  cow- 
slip, the  daffodil,  the  crocus,  the  butter- 
cup, half  the  daisy,  the  honey-suckle,  and 
the  loveliest  rose.  Yellow,  too,  has  its 
turn  even  with  the  leaves  ;  and  what  an 
artist  he  shows  himself  when,  in  autumn, 
he  '  lays  his  fiery  finger '  upon  them,  light- 
ing up  the  forlorn  woodland  with  splashes 
—  pure  palette-colour  of  audacious  gold  ! 
He  hangs  the  mulberry  with  heart-shaped 
yellow  shields  —  which  reminds  one  of 
the  heraldic  importance  of  '  or ' —  and  he 
lines  the  banks  of  the  Seine  with  phan- 
tasmal yellow  poplars.  And  other  leaves 
still  dearer  to  the  heart  are  yellow  like- 
wise ;  leaves  of  those  sweet  old  poets 
whose  thoughts  seem  to  have  turned  the 
pages  gold.  Let  us  dream  of  this  :  a 
maid  with  yellow  hair,  clad   in   a  yellow 


94       PROSE    FANCIES 

gown,  seated  in  a  yellow  room,  at  the 
window  a  yellow  sunset,  in  the  grate  a 
yellow  fire,  at  her  side  a  yellow  lamplight, 
on  her  knee  a  Yellow  Book.  And  the 
letters  we  love  best  to  read — when  we 
dare  —  are  they  not  yellow,  too  ?  No 
doubt  some  disagreeable  things  are  reported 
of  yellow.  We  have  had  the  yellow- 
fever,  and  we  have  had  pea-soup.  The 
eyes  of  lions  are  said  to  be  yellow,  and  the 
ugliest  cats — the  cats  that  infest  one's 
garden  —  are  always  yellow.  Some  med- 
icines are  yellow,  and  no  doubt  there  are 
many  other  yellow  disagreeables  ;  but  we 
prefer  to  dwell  upon  the  yellow  blessings. 
I  had  almost  forgotten  that  the  gayest 
wines  are  yellow.  Nor  has  religion  for- 
gotten yellow.  It  is  to  be  hoped  yel- 
low will  not  forget  religion.  The  sacred 
robe  of  the  second  greatest  religion  of  the 
world  is  yellow,  '  the  yellow  robe  '  of  the 
Buddhist  friar ;  and  when  the  sacred  har- 
lots of  Hindustan  walk  in  lovely  proces- 
sion through  the  streets,  they,  too,  like 
the  friars,  are  clad  in  yellow.  Amber  is 
yellow  ;  so  is  the  orange ;  and  so  were 
stage-coaches  and   many  dashing  things  of 


PROSE    FANCIES       95 

the  old  time  ;  and  pink  is  yellow  by  lamp- 
light. But  gold-mines,  it  has  been  proved, 
are  not  so  yellow  as  is  popularly  supposed. 
Hymen's  robe  is  Miltonically  '  saffron,' 
and  the  dearest  petticoat  in  all  literature 
—  not  forgetting  the  '  tempestuous  '  gar- 
ment of  Herrick's  Julia  —  was  '  yaller.' 
Yes! 

'  'Er  petticoat  was  yaller  an'  'er  little  cap  was  green, 
An  'er  name   was  Supi-yaw-lat,  jes'  the  same  as  Thee- 
baw's  Queen.' 

Is  it  possible  to   say  anything   prettier 
for  yellow  than  that  ? 


PROSE     FANCIES  — IX 

LETTER      TO     AN      UNSUCCESS- 
FUL   LITERARY    MAN 

¥ 

MY  DEAR  SIR: —  I  agree  with 
every  word  you  say.  You  have 
my  entire  sympathy.  The  world 
is  indeed  hard,  hard  to  the  sad  —  particu- 
larly hard  to  the  unsuccessful.  A  sure 
five  hundred  a  year  covers  a  multitude  of 
sorrows.  It  is  ever  an  ill  wind  for  the 
shorn  lamb.  If  it  be  true  that  nothing 
succeeds  like  success,  it  is  no  less  sadly 
true  that  nothing  fails  like  failure.  And 
when  one  thinks  of  it,  it  is  only  natural, 
for  every  failure  is  an  obstruction  in  the 
stream  of  life.  Metaphorical  writers  are 
fond  of  saying  that  the  successful  ride  to 
success  on  the  back  of  the  failures.  It  is 
true  that  many  rise  on  stepping-stones  of 
their  dead  relations  —  but  that  is  because 
their  relations  have  been  financial  suc- 
cesses. In  trut!  ,  instead  of  the  failure 
making  the  fortune  of  the  successful,  it  is 

96 


PROSE    FANCIES       97 

just  the  reverse.  A  very  successful  man 
would  be  the  more  successful  were  it 
not  for  the  failures  —  on  whom  he  has 
either  to  spend  his  money  to  support,  or 
his  time  to  advise.  The  strong  are  said 
to  be  impatient  towards  the  weak  —  and 
is  it  to  be  wondered  at,  in  a  world  where 
even  the  strongest  need  all  their  strength, 
in  a  sea  where  the  best  swimmer  needs  all 
his  wind  and  muscle  and  skill  to  keep 
afloat?  If  success  is  sometimes  'unfeel- 
ing '  towards  failure,  failure  is  often  unfair 
to  success.  Of  course,  'it  is  He  that 
hath  made  us  and  not  we  ourselves,'  but 
that  is  a  text  that  cuts  both  ways ;  and 
when  all  is  said  and  done,  the  failure  de- 
tracts from  the  force  in  the  universe;  he 
is  the  clog  on  the  wheel  of  fortune.  To 
say  that  the  successful  man  benefits  by 
the  failure  of  others  is  as  true  as  it  would 
be  to  say  that  the  ratepayer  benefits  by 
the  poor  rates.  You  use  the  word  '  charla- 
tan' somewhat  profusely,  of  several  suc- 
cessful writers,  and  no  doubt  you  are  right. 
But  you  must  remember  that  it  is  a  favour- 
ite charge  against  the  gifted  and  the  for- 
tunate.     Because  we   have   failed   by  fair 


98        PROSE    FANCIES 

means,  we  are  sure  the  other  fellows  have 
succeeded  by  foul.  And,  moreover,  one  is 
apt  to  forget  how  much  talent  is  needed 
to  be  a  charlatan.  Never  look  down 
upon  a  charlatan.  Courage,  skill,  per- 
sonal force  or  charm,  great  knowledge  of 
human  nature,  dramatic  instinct,  and  in- 
dustry —  few  charlatans  succeed  (and  no 
one  is  called  a  charlatan  till  he  does  suc- 
ceed, be  his  success  as  low  or  high  as  you 
please)  without  possessing  a  majority  of 
these  qualities;  how  many  of  which  —  it 
would  be  interesting  to  know  —  do  you 
possess  .'' 

Indeed,  it  would  seem  to  need  more 
gifts  to  be  a  rogue  than  an  honest  man, 
and  there  is  a  sense  in  which  every  great 
man  may  be  described  as  a  charlatan  — 
plus  greatness  ;  greatness  being  an  almost 
indefinable  quality,  a  quality,  at  any  rate, 
on  which  there  is  a  bewildering  diversity 
of  opinion. 

You  seem  a  little  cross  with  publishers 
and  editors.  They  have  not  proved  the 
distinguished,  brilliant,  and  sympathetic 
beings  you  imagined  them  in  your  boyish 
dreams.      No  doubt,  publishers  and  editors 


PROSE    FANCIES       99 

enter  hardly  into  the  kingdom  of  heaven. 
But  then,  you  see,  they  don't  care  so 
much  about  that ;  they  are  much  more 
interested  in  the  next  election  at  certain 
fashionable  clubs.  It  is  really  a  little  hard 
on  them  that  they  should  suffer  from  the 
ignorant  misconception  of  the  literary 
amateur.  It  is  only  those  who  have  had 
no  dealings  with  them  who  would  be  un- 
fair enough  to  expect  publishers  or  editors 
to  be  literary  men.  They  are  business 
men — business  men  par  excellence — and 
a  good  thing,  too,  for  their  papers  and 
their  authors.  You  lament  their  merce- 
nary view  of  life;  but,  judging  by  your 
letter,  even  you  are  not  disposed  to  regard 
money  as  the  root  of  all  evil. 

You  cannot  understand  why  you  have 
failed  where  others  have  succeeded.  You 
have  far  more  Greek  than  Keats,  more 
history  than  Scott,  and  you  know  nineteen 
languages  —  ten  of  them  to  speak.  With 
so  many  accomplishments,  it  must  indeed 
be  hard  to  fail  —  though  you  do  not  seem 
to  have  found  it  difficult.  You  have 
travelled,  too  —  have  been  twice  round  the 
world,  and  have  a  thorough  knowledge  of 


100      PROSE    FANCIES 

the  worst  hotels.  Certainly,  it  is  singular. 
Nevertheless,  I  must  confess  that  the 
dullest  men  I  have  ever  met  have  been 
professors  of  history ;  the  worst  poets  have 
not  only  known  Greek,  but  French  as 
well ;  and,  generally  speaking,  the  most 
tiresome  of  my  acquaintances  have  more 
degrees  than  I  have  Latin  to  name 
them  in.  Alas  !  it  is  not  experience,  or 
travel,  or  language,  but  the  use  we  make 
of  them,  that  makes  literary  success, 
which,  one  may  add,  is  particularly  de- 
pendent—  perhaps  not  unnaturally  —  on 
the  use  we  make  of  language.  A  book  may 
be  a  book,  although  there  is  neither  Latin 
nor  Greek,  nor  travel,  nor  experience  —  in 
fact  'nothing'  in  it;  and  though,  like  my- 
self, you  may  pay  an  Oxford  professor  a 
thousand  a  year  to  correct  your  proofs,  you 
may  still  miss  immortality. 

To  these  intellectual  and  general  equip- 
ments you  add  goodness  of  heart,  sincerity 
of  conviction,  and  martyrdom  for  your 
opinions ;  you  are,  it  would  seem,  like 
many  others  of  us,  the  best  fellow  and 
greatest  man  of  your  acquaintance.  Permit 
me  to  remind  you  that  we  are  not  talking 


PROSE    FANCIES      loi 

of  goodness  of  heart,  of  strength  or  beauty 
of  character,  but  of  success,  which  is  a  thing 
apart,  a  fine  art  in  itself. 

You  confess  that  you  are  somewhat  un- 
practical: you  expect  others  —  hard-worked 
journalists  who  never  met  you  — to  tell  you 
what  to  read,  how  to  form  your  style !  and 
how  '  to  get  into  the  magazines.'  You 
are,  you  say,  with  something  of  pride,  but 
a  poor  business  man.  That  is  a  pity,  for 
nearly  every  successful  literary  man  of 
the  day,  and  particularly  the  novelists, 
are  excellent  business  men.  Indeed, 
the  history  of  literature  all  round  has 
proved  that  the  men  who  have  been 
masters  of  words  have  also  been  masters 
of  things — masters  of  the  facts  of  life  for 
which  those  words  stand.  Many  writers 
have  mismanaged  their  affairs  from  idleness 
and  indifference,  but  few  from  incapacity. 
Leigh  Hunt  boasted  that  he  could  never 
master  the  multiplication  table.  Perhaps 
that  accounts  for  his  comparative  failure 
as  a  writer.  Incompetence  in  one  art  is 
far  from  being  a  guarantee  of  competency 
in  another,  and  a  man  is  all  the  more 
likely  to  make  a  name    if   he   is  able    to 


I02      PROSE    FANCIES 

make  a  living — though,  judging  from 
Coleridge,  it  seems  a  good  plan  to  let 
another  hard-worked  man  support  one's 
wife  and  children.  On  the  other  hand, 
though  business  faculty  is  a  great  deal,  it 
is  not  everything  :  for  a  man  may  be  as 
punctual  and  methodical  as  Southev,  and 
yet  miss  the  prize  of  his  high  calling,  or 
as  generally  'impossible'  as  Blake,  and 
yet  win  his  place  among  the  immortals. 

In  fact, after  all,  success  in  literature  has 
something  to  do  with  writing.  In  tem- 
porary success,  industry  and  business  fac- 
ulty, and  an  unworked  field  —  be  it  Scot- 
land, Ireland,  or  the  Isle  of  Man  (any 
place  but  plain  England!)  —  are  the  chief 
factors.  For  that  more  lasting  success 
which  we  call  fame  other  qualities  are 
needed,  such  qualities  as  imagination, 
fancy,  and  magic  and  force  in  the  use  of 
words.  Can  you  honestly  say,  O  beloved, 
though  tiresome,  correspondent,  that  these 
great  gifts  are  yours  ?  Judging  from  your 
letter — -but  Heaven  forbid  that  I  should 
be  unkind  !  For,  need  I  say  I  love  you 
with  a  fellow-feeling  ?  Do  you  think  that 
you  are  the  onl\'  unappreciated  genius  on  the 


PROSE     FANCIES      103 

planet — not  to  speak  of  all  the  other  un- 
appreciated geniuses  on  all  the  other  planets. 
Thank  goodness,  the  postal  arrangements 
with  the  latter  are  as  yet  defective !  Others 
there  are  with  hearts  as  warm,  minds  as 
profound,  and  style  at  least  as  attractive, 
who  languish  in  unmerited  neglect.  Mil- 
tons  inglorious  indeed,  though  far  from 
mute. 

Believe  me,  you  are  not  alone.  In 
fact,  there  are  so  many  like  you  that  it 
would  be  quite  easy  for  you  to  find  society 
without  worrying  me.  And  for  all  of  us, 
there  is  the  consolation  that,  though  we 
fail  as  writers,  we  may  still  succeed  as 
citizens,  as  husbands  and  fathers  and 
friends.  As  Whitman  would  say  —  be- 
cause you  are  not  Editor  of  The  Times  do 
you  give  in  that  you  are  less  than  a  man  ? 
There  are  poets  that  have  never  entered 
into  the  Bodley  Head,  and  great  prose 
writers  who  have  never  sat  in  an  editorial 
chair.  Be  satisfied  with  your  heavenly 
crowns,  O  you  whining  unsuccessful,  and 
leave  to  your  inferiors  the  earthly  five- 
shilling  pieces. 


PROSE    FANC  I  ES  — X 

A     POET     IN     THE 
CITY 

¥ 

'  In  the  midway  of  this  our  mortal  life, 
I  found  me  in  a  gloomy  wood,  astray.' 

I  (AND  when  I  say  I,  I  must  be 
understood  to  be  speaking  dramatic- 
ally) only  venture  into  the  City  once 
a  year,  for  the  very  pleasant  purpose  of 
drawing  that  twelve-pound-ten  by  which 
the  English  nation,  ever  so  generously 
sensitive  to  the  necessities,  not  to  say 
luxuries  of  the  artist,  endeavours  to  ex- 
press its  pride  and  delight  in  me.  It 
would  be  a  very  graceful  exercise  of  grati- 
tude for  me  here  to  stop  and  parenthesise 
the  reader  on  the  subject  of  all  that  twelve- 
pound-ten  has  been  to  me,  how  it  has  quite 
changed  the  course  of  my  life,  given  me 
that  long-desired  opportunity  of  doing  my 
best  work  in  peace,  for  which  so  often  I 
vainly  sighed  in  Fleet  Street,  and  even 
allowed  me  an  indulgence  in  minor  luxuries 

104 


PROSE    FANCIES      105 

which  I  could  not  have  dreamed  of  enjoy- 
ing before  the  days  of  that  twelve-pound- 
ten.  Now  not  only  peace  and  plenty,  but 
leisure  and  luxury  are  mine.  There  is 
nothing  goes  so  far  as — Government 
money. 

Usually  on  these  literally  State  occa- 
sions, I  drive  up  in  state,  that  is,  in  a 
hansom.  There  is  only  one  other  day  in 
the  year  on  which  I  am  so  splendid,  but 
that  is  another  beautiful  story.  It,  too,  is 
a  day  and  an  hour  too  joyous  to  be  ap- 
proached otherwise  than  on  winged  wheels, 
too  stately  to  be  approached  in  merely 
pedestrian  fashion.  To  go  on  foot  to  draw 
one's  pension  seems  a  sort  of  slight  on  the 
great  nation  that  does  one  honour,  as 
though  a  Lord  Mayor  should  make  his 
appearance  in  the  procession  in  his  office 
coat. 

So  I  say  it  is  my  custom  to  go  gaily, 
and  withal  stately,  to  meet  my  twelve- 
pound-ten  in  a  hansom.  For  many  reasons 
the  occasion  always  seems  something  of  an 
adventure,  and  I  confess  I  always  feel  a 
little  excited  about  it — indeed,  to  tell  the 
truth,  a  little  nervous.     As  I  glide  along 


io6      PROSE     FANCIES 

in  my  state  barge  (which  seems  a  much 
more  proper  and  impressive  image  for  a 
hansom  than  '  gondola,'  with  its  remin- 
iscences of  Earl's  Court)  I  feel  like  some 
fragile  country  flower  torn  from  its  roots, 
and  bewildcringly  hurried  along  upon  the 
turbid,  swollen  stream  of  London  life. 

The  stream  glides  sweetly  with  a  pleas- 
ant trotting  tinkle  of  bells  by  the  green  park- 
side  of  Piccadilly,  and  sweet  is  it  to  hear 
the  sirens  singing, and  to  see  them  combing 
their  gilded  locks,  on  the  yellow  sands  of 
Piccadilly  Circus  —  so  called,  no  doubt, 
from  the  number  of  horses  and  the  skill  of 
their  drivers.  Here  are  the  whirling  pools 
of  pleasure,  merry  wheels  of  laughing 
waters,  where  your  hansom  glides  along 
with  a  golden  ease  —  it  is  only  when  you 
enter  the  First  Cataract  of  the  Strand  that 
you  become  aware  of  the  far-distant  terri- 
ble roar  of  the  Falls  !  They  are  yet  nearly 
two  miles  away,  but  already,  like  Niagara, 
thou  hearest  the  sound  thereof — the  fateful 
sound  of  that  human  Niagara,  where  all 
the  great  rivers  of  London  converge  :  the 
dark,  strong  floods  surging  out  from  the 
gloomy   fastnesses   of  the    East    End,  the 


PROSE    FANCIES      107 

quick-running  streams  from  the  palaces  of 
the  West,  the  East  with  its  waggons,  the 
West  with  its  hansoms,  the  four  winds 
with  their  omnibuses,  the  horses  and  car- 
riages under  the  earth  jetting  up  their 
companies  of  grimy  passengers,  the  very 
air  busy  with  a  million  errands. 

You  are  in  the  rapids — metaphorically 
speaking — as  you  crawl  down  Cheapside, 
and  here  where  the  Bank  of  England  and 
the  Mansion  House  rise  sheer  and  awful 
from,  shall  we  say,  this  boiling  cauldron, 
this  ^hell'  of  angry  meeting  waters  — 
Threadneedle  Street  and  Cornhill,  Queen 
Victoria  Street  and  Cheapside,  each  '  run- 
ning,' again  metaphorically,  '  like  a  mill 
race' — here  in  this  wild  maelstrom  of 
human  life  and  human  conveyances,  here 
is  the  true  '  Niagara  in  London,'  here  are 
the  most  wonderful  falls  in  the  world  — 
the  London  Falls. 

*-  Yes  ! '  I  said  softly  to  myself,  and  I 
could  see  the  sly,  sad  smile  on  the  face  of 
the  dead  poet,  at  the  thought  of  whose 
serene  wisdom  a  silence  like  snow  seemed 
momentarily  to  cover  up  the  turmoil  — 
'Yes!'    I    said    softly,  '  there   is    still  the 


io8      PROSE    FANCIES 

same  old  crush  at  the  corner  of  Fenchurch 
street  !  ' 

By  this  time  I  had  disbursed  one  of  my 
two  annual  cab  fares,  and  was  standing  a 
little  forlorn  at  that  very  corner.  It  was 
a  March  afternoon,  bitter  and  gloomy; 
lamps  were  already  popping  alight  in  a 
desolate  way,  and  the  east  wind  whistled 
mournfully  through  the  ribs  of  the  passers- 
by.  A  very  unflower-like  man  was  de- 
jectedly calling  out '  daffadowndillies'  close 
by.  The  sound  of  the  pretty  old  word, 
thus  quaintly  spoken,  brightened  the  air 
better  than  the  electric  lights  which  sud- 
denly shot  rows  of  wintry  moonlight  along 
the  streets.  I  bought  a  bunch  of  the  poor, 
pinched  flowers,  and  asked  the  man  how 
he  came    to   call    them  ^  daffadowndillies.' 

*■  D'vunshur,'  he  said,  in  anything  but  a 
Devonshire  accent,  and  then  the  east  wind 
took  him  and  he  was  gone — doubtless  to 
a  neighbouring  tavern  ;  and  no  wonder, 
poor  soul.  Flowers  certainly  fall  into 
strange  hands  here  in  London. 

Well,  it  was  nearing  four,  and  if  I 
wanted  a  grateful  country's  twelve-pound- 
ten,  I   must  make  haste  ;    so  presently  I 


PROSE    FANCIES      109 

found  myself  in  a  great  hall,  of  which  I 
have  no  clearer  impression  than  that  there 
were  soft  little  lights  all  about  me,  and  a 
soft  chime  of  falling  gold,  like  the  rippling 
of  Pactolus.  I  have  a  sort  of  idea,  too, 
of  a  great  number  of  young  men  with 
most  beautiful  moustaches,  playing  with 
golden  shovels;  and  as  I  thus  stood 
among  the  soft  lights  and  listened  to  the 
most  beautiful  sound  in  the  world,  I 
thought  that  thus  must  Danae  have  felt 
as  she  stood  amid  the  falling  shower.  But 
I  took  care  to  see  that  my  twelve  sover- 
eigns and  a  half  were  right  number  and 
weight  for  all  that. 

Once  more  in  the  street,  I  lingered 
awhile  to  take  a  last  look  at  the  Falls. 
What  a  masterful  alien  life  it  all  seemed 
to  me.  No  single  personality  could  hope 
to  stand  alone  amid  all  that  stress  of  pon- 
derous, bullying  forces.  Only  public  com- 
panies, and  such  great  impersonalities,  could 
hope  to  hold  their  own,  to  swim  in  such  a 
whirlpool — and  even  they,  I  had  heard  it 
whispered  far  away  in  my  quiet  starlit  gar- 
ret, sometimes  went  down.  '  How,'  I 
cried,  '  would  — 


no      PROSE    FANCIES 

'.  .      my  tiny  spark    of  being  wholly  vanish   in   your 

deeps  and  heights 
Rush  of  suns,  and  roll  of  systems,  and  your  fiery 
clash  of  meteorites,* 

again  quoting  poetry.  1  always  quote 
poetry  in  the  City,  as  a  protest  —  more- 
over, it  clears  the  air. 

The  more  people  buffeted  against  me 
the  more  I  felt  the  crushing  sense  of 
almost  cosmic  forces.  Everybody  was  so 
plainly  an  atom  in  a  public  company,  a 
drop  of  water  in  a  tyrannous  stream  of 
human  energy  —  companies  that  cared 
nothing  for  their  individual  atoms,  streams 
that  cared  nothing  for  their  component 
drops;  such  atoms  and  drops,  for  the  most 
part,  to  be  had  for  thirty  shillings  a  week. 
These  people  about  me  seemed  no  more 
like  individual  men  and  women  than  indi- 
vidual puffs  in  a  mighty  rushing  wind,  or 
the  notes  in  a  great  scheme  of  music,  are 
men  and  women  —  to  the  banker  so  many 
pens  with  ears  whereon  to  perch  them,  to 
the  capitalist  so  many  *■  hands,'  and  to  the 
City  man  generally  so  many  '  helpless 
pieces  of  the  game  he  pla-,s  '  up  there  in 
spidery  nooks  and  corners  of  the  City. 


PROSE    FANCIES      iii 

As  I  listened  to  the  throbbing  of  the 
great  human  engines  in  the  buildings 
about  me,  a  rising  and  a  falling  there 
seemed  as  of  those  great  steel-limbed 
monsters,  weird  contortionists  of  metal, 
that  jet  up  and  down,  and  writhe  and 
wrestle  this  way  and  that,  behind  the  long 
glass  windows  of  great  water-towers,  or 
toil  like  Vulcan  in  the  bowels  of  mighty 
ships.  An  expression  of  frenzy  seems  to 
come  up  even  from  the  dumb  tossing  steel, 
sometimes  it  seems  to  be  shaking  great 
knuckled  fists  at  one  and  brandishing 
threatening  arms,  as  it  strains  and  sweats 
beneath  the  lash  of  the  compulsive  steam. 
As  one  watches  it,  there  seems  something 
of  human  agony  about  its  panic-stricken 
labours,  and  something  like  a  sense  of  pity 
surprises  one  —  a  sense  of  pity  that  any- 
thing in  the  world  should  have  to  work 
like  that,  even  steel,  even,  as  we  say, 
senseless  steel.  What,  then,  of  these 
great  human  engine-houses  !  Will  the 
engines  always  consent  to  rise  and  fall, 
night  and  day,  like  that  ?  or  will  there 
some  day  be  a  mighty  convulsion,  and 
this  blind  Samson  of  labour  pull  down  the 


112      PROSE    FANCIES 

whole  engine-house  upon  his  oppressors? 
Who  knows?  These  are  questions  for 
great  politicians  and  thinkers  to  decide, 
not  for  a  poet,  who  is  too  much  terrified 
by  such  forces  to  be  able  calmly  to  esti- 
mate and  prophesy  concerning  them. 

Yes!  if  you  want  to  realise  Tennyson's 
picture  of  *  one  poor  poet's  scroll'  ruling 
the  world,  take  your  poet's  scroll  down  to 
Fenchurch  street  and  try  it  there.  Ah, 
what  a  powerless  little  '  private  interest' 
seems  poetry  there,  poetry  'whose  action 
is  no  stronger  than  a  flower.'  In  days  of 
peace  it  ventures  even  into  the  morning 
papers,  but,  let  only  a  rumour  of  war  be 
heard,  and  it  vanishes  like  a  dream  on 
doomsday  morning.  A  County  Council 
election  passeth  over  it  and  it  is  gone. 

Yet  it  was  near  this  very  spot  that 
Keats  dug  up  the  buried  beauty  of  Greece, 
lying  hidden  beneath  F"insbury  Pavement! 
and  in  the  deserted  City  churches  great 
dramatists  lie  about  us.  Mavbe  I  have 
wronged  the  City — and  at  this  thought  I 
remembered  a  little  bookshop  but  a  few 
yards  away,  blossoming  like  a  rose  right 
in  the  heart  of  the  wilderness. 


PROSE    FANCIES      113 

Here,  after  all,  in  spite  of  all  my  whirl- 
pools and  engine-houses,  was  for  me  the 
greatest  danger  in  the  City.  Need  I  say, 
therefore,  that  I  promptly  sought  it,  hov- 
ered about  it  a  moment  —  and  entered. 
How  much  of  that  grateful  governmental 
twelve-pound-ten  came  out  alive,  I  dare 
not  tell  my  dearest  friend. 

At  all  events  I  came  out  somehow  re- 
assured, more  rich  in  faith.  There  was  a 
might  of  poesy  after  all.  There  were 
words  in  the  little  yellow-leaved  garland, 
nestling  like  a  bird  in  my  hand,  that  would 
outlast  the  bank  yonder,  and  outlive  us  all. 
I  held  it  up.  How  tiny  it  seemed,  how 
frail  amid  all  this  stone  and  iron.  A  mere 
flower  —  a  flower  from  the  seventeenth 
century  —  long-lived  for  a  flower  !  Yes, 
an  immortelle. 


PROSE     FANCIES  — XI 


BROWN      ROSES, 


.  T  I   7'ELL,   I   never    thought  to  see 

Y  Y      this   day,  sir,'  said  Gibbs,  with 

something     like    tears     in     his 

voice,  as  he   reluctantly  plied   his  scissors 

upon     Hyacinth      Rondel's     distinguished 

curls. 

'  Nor  I,  Gibbs  —  nor  I  ! '  said  Rondel, 
sadly,  relapsing  into  silence  again,  with  his 
head  meekly  bent  over  the  white  sheet 
spread  to  catch  his  shorn   beauty. 

'To  think  of  the  times,  sir,  that  I  have 
dressed  your  head,'  continued  Gibbs, 
whose  grief  bore  so  marked  an  emphasis, 
'  and  to  think  that  after  to-day   .   .   .' 

'  But  you  forget,  my  dear  Gibbs,  that  I 
shall  now  be  a  more  constant  customer 
than  ever  !  ' 

'  Ah,  sir,  but  that  will  be  different.  It 
will  be  mere  machine-cutting,  lawn-mow- 
ing, steam-reaping — if  you  understand  me 
—  there  '11  be  no  pleasure  in  it  —  no  artis- 
tic pleasure,  I  mean.' 

114 


PROSE    FANCIES      115 

*  Yes,  Gibbs,  and  you  are  an  artist  —  I 
have  often  told  you  that.' 

'  Ah,  sir,  but  I  am  coming  to  the  con- 
clusion that  it  is   better  not  to  be  an  artist 

—  better  to  be  born  just  like  every  one 
else.  In  these  days  one  suffers  too  much. 
Why,  sir,  I  have  n't  in  the  whole  of  my 
business  six  heads  like  yours,  and  I  go  on 
cutting  all  the  rest,  week  in  and  week  out, 
just  for  the  pleasure  of  dressing  those  six 

—  and  now  there  '11  only  be  five.' 

*  *  * 

.;),*' It  looks  like  a  winding-sheet,'  mused 
-Rondel  presently,  after  a  long  silence, 
broken  only  by  the  soft  crunch  and  click 
of  the  fatal  scissors,  as  they  feasted  on  the 
beautiful  brown  silk. 

'  It  do,  indeed,  sir,'  said  Gibbs,  with  a 
shudder,  as  another  little  globe  of  golden 
brown  rolled  down  into  Rondel's  lap. 

'  Poor  brown  roses  !  '  sighed  the  poet, 
after  another  silence;  'they  are  just  like 
brown  roses,  are  n't  they,  Gibbs  ?  ' 

'  They  are,  indeed,  sir.' 

*■  Brown  roses  scattered  over  the  wind- 
ing-sheet of  one's  youth — eh,  Gibbs  ? ' 

'  They  are,  indeed,  sir ! ' 


ii6      PROSE    FANCIES 

'  That 's  rather  a  pretty  image,  don't 
you  think,  Gibbs  ?  ' 

*■  Indeed,  I  do,  sir  ! ' 

*■  Well,  well,  they  have  bloomed  their 
last ;  and  when  Juliet's  white  hands  come 
seeking  with  their  silver  fingers  white 
maidens  lost  in  the  brown  enchanted  for- 
est, there  will  not  be  a  rose  left  for  her  to 
gather.' 

*■  Believe  me,  sir;  I  would  more  gladly 
have  cut  off  your  head  than  your  hair  — 
that  is,  figuratively  speaking,'  sobbed  the 
artist-in-hair-oils. 

'  Yes,  my  head  would  hardly  be  missed, 
you  are  quite  right,  Gibbs  ;  but  my  hair! 
What  will  they  do  without  it  at  first  nights 
and  private  views  ?  It  was  worth  five 
shillings  a  week  to  many  a  poor  paragraph- 
writer.  Well,  I  must  try  and  make  up 
for  it  by  my  beard  ! ' 

'  Your  beard,  sir  ? '  exclaimed  Gibbs  in 
horror. 

'  Yes,  Gibbs,  for  some  years  I  have 
been  a  Nazarene,  that  is,  a  Nazarite,  for 
the  top  half  of  my  head  ;  now  I  am  going 
to  change  about,  and  be  a  Nazarite  with 
the   lower.     The    razor     has    kissed    my 


PROSE    FANCIES      117 

cheeks  and  my  chin  and  the  fluted  column 
of  my  throat  for  the  last  time.' 

'  You  cannot  mean  it,  sir,'  said  Gibbs, 
suspending  his  murderous  task  a  moment. 

'  It 's  quite  true,  Gibbs.' 

*  Does  she  wish  that,  too,  sir  ?  ' 

'  Yes,  that,  too.' 

*■  Well,  sir,  I  have  heard  of  men  making 
sacrifices  for  their  wives,  but  of  all  the 
cruel   .  .    .' 

*■  Please  don't,  Gibbs,  it  does  no  good. 
And  Mrs.  Rondel's  motive  is  a  good  one.' 

'  Of  course,  sir.  I  cannot  presume  — 
and  yet,  if  it  would  n't  be  presuming,  I 
should  like  to  know  why  you  are  making 
this  great,  I  may  say  this  noble,  sacrifice.' 

'Well,  Gibbs,  we're  old  friends,  and 
I  '11  tell  you  some  day,  but  I  hardly  feel 
up  to  it  to-day.' 

'  Of  course  not,  sir  —  of  course  not ;  it 's 
only  natural,'  said  Gibbs  tenderly,  while 
the  scissors  once  more  took  up  the  con- 
versation. 


PROSE     FANCIES  — XII 

THE     DONKEY     THAT    LOVED 
A      STAR 


^^T^HAT  is   how  the  donkey  tells  his 

J.  love  !  '  I  said  one  day,  with  intent 
to  be  funny,  as  the  prolonged 
love-whoop  of  a  distant  donkey  was  heard 
in  the  land. 

'  Do  n't  be  too  ready  to  laugh  at  don- 
keys,' said  my  friend. 

'  For,'  he  continued,  *  even  donkeys 
have  their  dreams.  Perhaps,  indeed,  the 
most  beautiful  dreams  are  dreamed  by 
donkeys.' 

*  Indeed,'  I  said,  '  and  now  that  I  think 
of  it,  I  remember  to  have  said  that  most 
dreamers  are  donkeys,  though  I  never  ex- 
pected so  scientific  a  corroboration  of  a 
fleeting  jest.' 

Now,  my  friend  is  an  emment  scientist 
and  poet  in  one,  a  serious  combination, 
and  he  took  mv  remarks  with  seriousness 
at  once  scientific  and  poetic. 

ii8 


PROSE    FANCIES      119 

*  Yes,'  he  went  on,  *■  that  is  where  you 
clever  people  make  a  mistake.  You  think 
that  because  a  donkey  has  only  two  vowel 
sounds  wherewith  to  express  his  emotions, 
he  has  no  emotions  to  express.  But  let 
me  tell  you,  sir  .   .   .' 

But  here  we  both  burst  out  laughing  — 
*■  You    Golden    Ass  ! '    I   said,  '  take  a 
munch  of  these   roses ;  perhaps  they  will 
restore  you.' 

'  No,'  he  resumed,  '  I  am  quite  serious. 
I  have  for  many  years  past  made  a  study 
of  donkeys  —  high-stepping  critics  call  it 
the  study  of  Human  Nature  —  however, 
it 's  the  same  thing  —  and  I  must  say  that 
the  more  I  study  them  the  more  I  love 
them.  There  is  nothing  so  well  worth 
studying  as  the  misunderstood,  for  the  very 
reason  that  everybody  thinks  he  under- 
stands it.  Now,  to  take  another  instance, 
most  people  think  they  have  said  the  last 
word  on  a  goose  when  they  have  called  it 
"a  goose!"  —  but  let  me  tell  you, 
sir  .   .   .' 

But  here  again  we  burst  out  laughing — 

'Dear  goose  of  the  golden  eggs,'  I  said, 

*  pray  leave  to  discourse  on  geese  to-night 


120      PROSE    FANCIES 

—  though  lovely  and  pleasant  would  the 
discourse  be  —  to-night  I  am  all  agog  for 
donkeys.* 

'  So  be  it,'  said  my  friend,  '  and  if  that 
be  so,  I  cannot  do  better  than  tell  you  the 
story  of  the  donkey  that  loved  a  star  — 
keeping  for  another  day  the  no  less  fascin- 
ating story  of  the  goose  that  loved  an 
angel.' 

By  this  time  I  was,  appropriately, all  ears. 

'  Well,'  he  once  more  began,  '  there 
was  once  a  donkey,  quite  an  intimate 
friend  of  mine,  and  I  have  no  friend  of 
whom  I  am  prouder,  who  was  unpracti- 
cally fond  of  looking  up  at  the  stars.  He 
could  go  a  whole  day  without  thistles,  if 
night  would  only  bring  him  stars.  Of 
course  he  suffered  no  little  from  his  fellow 
donkeys  for  this  curious  passion  of  his. 
They  said  well  that  it  did  not  become 
him,  for  indeed  it  was  no  little  laugh- 
able to  see  him  gazing  so  sentimentally  at 
the  remote  and  pitiless  heavens.  Donkeys 
who  belonged  to  Shakespeare  societies  re- 
called the  fate  of  Bottom,  the  donkey  who 
had  loved  a  fairy,  but  our  donkey  paid 
little    heed.     There   is  perhaps  only  one 


PROSE    FANCIES      121 

advantage  in  being  a  donkey  —  namely,  a 
hide  impervious  to  criticism.  In  our 
donkey's  case  it  was  rather  a  dream  that 
made  him  forget  his  hide — a  dream  that 
drew  up  all  the  sensitiveness  from  every 
part,  from  hoof,  and  hide,  and  ears,  so  that 
all  the  feeling  in  his  whole  body  was  cen- 
tred in  his  eyes  and  brain,  and  those,  as 
we  have  said,  were  centred  on  a  star.  He 
took  it  for  granted  that  his  fellows  should 
sneer  and  kick  out  at  him  ;  it  was  ever  so 
with  genius  among  the  donkeys,  and  he 
had  very  soon  grown  used  to  these  atten- 
tions of  his  brethren,  which  were  powerless 
to  withdraw  his  gaze  from  the  star  he 
loved.  For  though  he  loved  all  the  stars, 
as  every  individual  man  loves  all  women, 
there  was  one  star  he  loved  more  than  any 
other;  and  standing  one  midnight  among 
his  thistles,  he  prayed  a  prayer,  a  prayer 
that  some  day  it  might  be  granted  him  to 
carry  that  star  upon  his  back,  —  which, 
he  recalled,  had  been  sanctified  by  the 
holy  sign,  —  were  it  but  for  ever  so  short 
a  journey.  Just  to  carry  it  a  little  way, 
and  then  to  die.  This  to  him  was  a 
dream  beyond  the  dreams  of  donkeys. 


122      PROSE     FANCIES 

'  Now,  one  night,'  continued  my  friend, 
taking  breath  for  himself  and  me,  'our 
poor  donkey  looked  up  to  the  sky,  and  lo  ! 
the  star  was  nowhere  to  be  seen.  He 
had  heard  it  said  that  stars  sometimes  fall. 
Evidently  his  star  had  fallen.  Fallen  ! 
but  what  if  it  had  fallen  upon  the  earth  ? 
Being  a  donkey,  the  wildest  dreams  seemed 
possible  to  him.  And,  strange  as  it  may 
seem,  there  came  a  day  when  a  poet  came 
to  his  master  and  bought  our  donkey  to 
carry  his  little  child.  Now,  the  very  first 
day  he  had  her  upon  his  back,  the  donkey 
knew  that  his  prayer  had  been  answered, 
and  that  the  little  swaddled  babe  he  carried 
was  the  star  he  had  prayed  for.  And, 
indeed,  so  it  was;  for  so  long  as  donkeys 
ask  no  more  than  to  fetch  and  carry  for 
their  beloved,  they  may  be  sure  of  beauty 
upon  their  backs.  Now,  so  long  as  this 
little  girl  that  was  a  star  remained  a  little 
girl,  our  donkey  was  happy.  For  many 
pretty  years  she  would  kiss  his  ugly  muzzle 
and  feed  his  mouth  with  sugar — and  thus 
our  donkey's  thoughts  sweetened  day  by 
day,  till  from  a  natural  pessimist  he  blos- 
somed into  a  perfectly  absurd  optimist,  and 


PROSE    FANCIES      123 

dreamed  the  donkiest  of  dreams.  But, 
one  day,  as  he  carried  the  girl  who  was 
really  a  star  through  the  spring  lanes,  a 
young  man  walked  beside  her,  and  though 
our  donkey  thought  very  little  of  his  talk 

—  in  fact,  felt  his  plain  "hee-haw"  to  be 
worth  all  its  smart  chirping  and   twittering 

—  yet  it  evidently  pleased  the  maiden.  It 
included  quite  a  number  of  vowel-sounds, 
though  if  the  maiden  had  only  known,  it 
did  n't  mean  half  so  much  as  the  donkey's 
plain  monotonous  declaration. 

'  Well,  our  donkey  soon  began  to  realise 
that  his  dream  was  nearing  its  end ;  and, 
indeed,  one  day  his  little  mistress  came 
bringing  him  the  sweetest  of  kisses,  the 
very  best  sugar  in  the  very  best  shops,  but 
for  all  that  our  donkey  knew  that  it  meant 
good-bye.  It  is  the  charming  manner  of 
English  girls  to  be  at  their  sweetest  when 
they  say  good-bye, 

'  Our  dreamer-donkey  went  into  exile 
as  servant  to  a  woodcutter,  and  his  life  was 
lenient  if  dull,  for  the  woodcutter  had  no 
sticks  to  waste  upon  his  back  ;  and  next 
day  his  young  mistress  who  was  once  a 
star  took  a  pony  for  her  love,  whom  some 


124      PROSE    FANCIES 

time  after  she  discarded  for  a  talented 
hunter,  and,  one  fine  day,  Hke  many  of  her 
sex,  she  pitched  her  affections  upon  a 
man — he  too  being  a  talented  hunter.  To 
their  wedding  came  all  the  countryside. 
And  with  the  countryside  came  the  don- 
key. He  carried  a  great  bundle  of  fire- 
wood for  the  servants'  hall,  and  as  he  waited 
outside,  gazing  up  at  his  old  loves  the  stars, 
while  his  master  drank  deeper  and  deeper 
within,  he  revolved  many  thoughts.  But 
he  is  only  known  to  have  made  one  remark 
— in  the  nature,  one  may  think,  of  a  grim 
jest  — 

*■  "  After  all  !'  he  was  heard  to  say,  "  she 
has  married  a  donkey,  after  all." 

'  No  doubt  it  was  feeble  ;  but  then  our 
donkey  was  growing  old  and  bitter,  and 
hope  deferred  had  made  him  a  cynic' 


PROSE  FANCIES— XIII 

ON    LOVING    ON  E  *  S 
ENEMIES 

¥ 

LIKE  all  people  who  live  apart  from 
it,  the  Founder  of  the  Christian  re- 
ligion was  possessed  of  a  profound 
knowledge  of  the  world.  As,  according 
to  che  proverb,  the  woodlander  sees  noth- 
ing of  the  wood  for  its  trees,  so  those 
who  live  in  the  world  know  nothing  of 
it.  They  know  its  gaudy,  glittering  sur- 
face, its  Crystal  Palace  fireworks,  and  the 
paste-diamonds  with  which  it  bedecks 
itself;  they  know  its  music  halls  and  its 
night  clubs,  its  Piccadillies  and  its  politics, 
its  restaurants  and  its  salons ;  but  of  the 
bad  —  or  good?  —  heart  of  it  all  they 
know  nothing.  In  more  meanings  than 
one,  it  takes  a  saint  to  catch  a  sinner ; 
and  Christ  certainly  knew  as  well  as  saved 
the  sinner. 

But  none  of  His  precepts  show  a  truer 
knowledge  of  life  and  its  conditions  than 

125 


126      PROSE    FANCIES 

His  commandment  that  wc  should  love 
our  enemies.  He  realised  — can  we  doubt  ? 
—  that  without  enemies  the  Church  He 
bade  His  followers  build  could  not  hope 
to  be  established.  He  knew  that  the 
spiritual  fire  he  strove  to  kindle  would 
spread  but  little  unless  the  four  winds  of 
the  world  blew  against  it.  Well,  indeed, 
may  the  Christian  Church  love  itsenemies, 
for  it  is  they  who  have  made  it. 

Indeed,  for  a  man,  or  a  cause,  that 
wants  to  get  on,  there  is  nothing  like  a  few 
hearty,  zealous  enemies.  Most  of  us 
would  never  be  heard  of  if  it  were  not  for 
our  enemies.  The  unsuccessful  man 
counts  up  his  friends,  but  the  successful  man 
numbers  his  enemies.  A  friend  of  mine 
was  lamenting,  the  other  day,  that  he 
could  not  find  twelve  people  to  disbelieve 
in  him.  He  had  been  seeking  them  for 
years,  he  sighed,  and  could  not  get  be- 
yond eleven.  But,  even  so,  with  only 
eleven  he  was  a  very  successful  man.  In 
these  kind-hearted  days  enemies  are  be- 
coming so  rare  that  one  has  to  go  out  of 
one's  way  to  make  them.  The  true  in- 
terpretation, therefore,   of   the    easiest  of 


PROSE    FANCIES      127 

the  commandments  is  —  make  your  ene- 
mies, and  your  enemies  will  make  you. 

So  soon  as  the  armed  men  begin  to 
spring  up  in  our  fields,  we  may  be  sure 
that  we  have  not  sown  in  vain. 

Properly  understood,  an  enemy  is  but  a 
negative  embodiment  of  our  personalities 
or  ideas.  He  is  an  involuntary  witness  to 
our  vitality.  Much  as  he  despises  us, 
greatly  as  he  may  injure  us,  he  is  none  the 
less  a  creature  of  our  making:.  It  was  we 
who  put  into  him  the  breath  of  his  malig- 
nity, and  inspired  the  activity  of  his  malice. 
Therefore,  with  his  very  existence  so 
tremendous  a  tribute,  we  can  afford  to 
smile  at  his  self-conscious  disclaimers  of 
our  significance.  Though  he  slay  us,  we 
made  him  —  to  '  make  an  enemy,'  is  not 
that  the  phrase  ? 

Indeed,  the  fact  that  he  is  our  enemy  is 
his  one  raison  d^ctre.  That  alone  should 
make  us  charitable  to  him.  Live  and  let 
live.  Without  us  our  enemy  has  no  oc- 
cupation, for  to  hate  us  is  his  profession. 
Think  of  his  wives  and  families  ! 

The  friendship  of  the  little  for  the  great 
is  an  old-established  profession  ;  there  is  but 


128      PROSE    FANCI?:S 

one  older — namely,  the  hatred  of  the  little 
for  the  great ;  and,  though  it  is  perhaps 
less  officially  recognized,  it  is  without 
doubt  the  more  lucrative.  It  is  one  of 
the  shortest  roads  to  fame.  Why  is  the 
name  of  Pontius  Pilate  an  uneasy  ghost  of 
history  ?  Think  what  fame  it  would  have 
meant  to  be  an  enemy  of  Socrates  or 
Shakespeare  !  Blackwood^ s  Magazine  and 
The  Quarterly  Review  only  survive  to-day 
because  they  once  did  their  best  to  strangle 
the  genius  of  Keats  and  Tennyson.  Two 
or  three  journals  of  our  own  time,  by  the 
same  unfailing  method,  seek  that  circula- 
tion from  posterity  which  is  denied  them  in 
the  present. 

This  is  particularly  true  in  literature, 
where  the  literary  enemy  is  as  organized  a 
tradesman  as  the  literary  agent.  Like  the 
literary  agent,  he  naturally  does  his  best  to 
secure  the  biggest  men.  No  doubt  the 
time  will  come  when  the  literary  cut-throat 
—  shall  we  call  him  ?  —  will  publish  dainty 
little  books  of  testimonials  from  authors, 
full  of  effusive  gratitude  for  the  manner  in 
which  they  have  been  slashed  and  blud- 
geoned into  fame.     '  Butcher  to  Mr.  Grant 


PROSE    FANCIES      129 

Allen  '  may  then  become  a  familiar  legend 
over  literary  shop-fronts  : — 

'Ah  !  did  you  stab  at  Shelley's  heart 

With  silly  sneer  and  cruel  lie  ? 
And  Wordsworth,  Tennyson,  and  Keats, 
To  murder  did  you  nobly  try  ? 

You  failed,  'tis  true  ;   but  what  of  that  ? 

The  world  remembers  still  your  name  — 
'Tis  fame,  /or  yoti,  to  be  the  cur 

That  barks  behind  the  heels  of  Fame. ' 

Any  one  who  is  fortunate  enough  to 
have  enemies  will  know  that  all  this  is  far 
from  being  fanciful.  If  one's  enemies 
have  any  other  raison  d'etre  beyond  the 
fact  of  their  being  our  enemies  —  what  is 
it .?  They  are  neither  beautiful  nor  clever, 
wise  nor  good,  famous,  nor,  indeed,  passa- 
bly distinguished.  Were  they  any  of 
these,  they  would  not  have  taken  to  so 
humble  a  means  of  getting  their  living. 
Instead  of  being  our  enemies,  they  could 
then  have  afforded  to  employ  enemies  on 
their  own  account.  Who,  indeed,  are  our 
enemies?  Broadly  speaking,  they  are  all 
those  people  who  lack  what  we  possess. 

If  you  are  rich,  every  poor  man  is 
necessarily  your  enemy.     If  you  are  beau- 


130      PROSE    FANCIES 

tiful,  the  great  democracy  of  the  plain  and 
ugly  will  mock  you  in  the  streets. 

It  will  be  the  same  with  everything  you 
possess.     The  brainless  will  never  forgive 
you   for  possessing  brains,  the  weak    will 
hate  you  for  your  strength,  and  the  evil  for 
your  good   heart.     If  you   can    write,  all 
the  bad  writers  are  at  once  your  foes.      If 
you  can   paint,  the  bad    painters   will   talk 
you    down.       But    more    than  any  talent 
or   charm   you   may  possess,  the   pearl   of 
price  for  which   you  will  be  most  bitterly 
hated  will  be  your  success.      You   can  be 
the   most   wonderful   person  that  ever  ex- 
isted so   long   as   you   don't  succeed,   and 
nobody  will    mind.     '  It  is   the  sunshine,' 
says  some  one,  'that  brings  out  the  adder.' 
So  powerful,  indeed,  is  success  that  it  has 
been  known  to  turn  a   friend  into  a  foe. 
Those,  then,  who    wish   to  engage   a  few 
trusty    enemies    out    of   place    need   only 
advertise  among  the  unsuccessful. 

P,S. — For  one  service  we  should  be 
particularly  thankful  to  our  enemies  —  they 
save  us  so  much  in  stimulants.  Their 
unbelief  so  helps  our  belief,  their  nega- 
tives make  us  so  positive. 


PROSE    FANCIES— XIV 

THE       DRAMATIC       ART 
OF       LIFE. 

IT  is  a  curious  truth  that,  whereas  in 
every  other   art    deliberate   choice  of 

method  and  careful  calculation  of  effect 
are  expected  from  the  artist,  in  the  greatest 
and  most  difficult  art  of  all,  the  art  of  life, 
this  is  not  so.  In  literature,  painting,  or 
sculpture  you  first  evolve  your  conception, 
and  then  after  long  study  of  it,  as  it 
glows  and  shimmers  in  your  imagination, 
you  set  about  the  reverent  selection  of 
that  form  which  shall  be  its  most  truthful 
incarnation,  in  words,  in  paint,  in  marble. 
Now  life,  as  has  been  said  many  times,  is 
an  art  too.  Sententious  morality  from 
time  past  has  told  us  that  we  are  each 
given  a  part  to  play,  evidently  implying, 
with  involuntary  cynicism,  that  the  art  of 
life  is  —  the  art  of  acting. 

As  with  the  actor,  we  are  each  given 
a  certain  dramatic  conception  for  the  ex- 


132      PROSE    FANCIES 

pression  of  which  we  have  precisely  the 
same  artistic  materials  —  namely,  our  own 
bodies,  sometimes  including  heart  and 
brains.  One  has  often  heard  the  com- 
plaint of  a  certain  actor  that  he  acts  him- 
self. On  the  metaphorical  stage  of  life 
the  complaint  and  the  implied  demand  are 
just  the  reverse.  How  much  more  in- 
teresting life  would  be  if  only  more  people 
had  the  courage  and  skill  to  act  themselves, 
instead  of  abjectly  understudying  some  one 
else.  Of  course,  there  are  supers  on  the 
stage  of  life  as  on  the  real  stage.  It  is 
proper  that  these  should  dress  and  speak 
and  think  alike.  These  one  courteously 
excepts  from  the  generalisation  that  the 
composer  of  the  play,  as  Marcus  Aurelius 
calls  him,  has  given  each  of  us  a  certain 
part  to  play — that  part  simply  oneself:  a 
part,  need  one  say,  by  no  means  as  easy  as 
it  seems  ;  a  part  most  difficult  to  study, 
and  requiring  daily  rehearsal.  So  difficult 
is  it,  indeed,  that  most  people  throw  up  the 
part,  and  join  the  ranks  of  the  supers  — 
who,  curiously  enough,  are  paid  much 
more  handsomely  than  the  principals. 
They  enter  one  of  the  learned  or  idle  pro- 


PROSE    FANCIES      133 

fesslons,  join  the  army  or  take  to  trade, 
and  so  speedily  rid  themselves  of  the  irk- 
some necessity  of  being  anything  more 
individual  than  '  the  learned  counsel/ 
'the  learned  judge,'  'my  lord  bishop,'  or 
'the  colonel,'  names  impersonal  in  applica- 
tion as  the  dignity  of  'Pharaoh,'  v^^hereof 
the  name  and  not  the  man  was  alone  im- 
portant. Henceforth  they  are  the  Church, 
the  Law,  the  Army,  the  City,  or  that 
vaguer  profession,  Society.  Entering  one 
of  these,  they  become  as  lost  to  the  really 
living  w^orld  as  the  monk  who  voluntarily 
surrenders  all  will  and  character  of  his 
own  at  the  threshold  of  his  monastery : 
bricks  in  a  prison  wall,  privates  in  the  line, 
peas  in  a  row.  But,  as  I  say,  these  are 
the  parts  that  pay.  For  playing  the  others, 
indeed,  you  are  not  paid,  but  expected  to 
pay  —  dearly. 

It  is  full  time  we  turned  to  those  on 
whom  falls  the  burden  of  those  real  parts. 
Such,  when  quite  young,  if  they  be  con- 
scientious artists,  will  carefully  consider 
themselves,  their  gifts  and  possibilities, 
study  to  discover  their  artistic  ratson  d'etre 
and  how  best  to  fulfil  it.      He  or  she  will 


134      PROSE    FANCIES 

say  :  Here  am  I,  a  creature  of  great  gifts 
and  exquisite  sensibilities,  drawn  by  great 
dreams,  and  vibrating  to  great  emotions; 
yet  this  potent  and  exquisite  self  is  as  yet, 
I  know,  but  unwrought  material  of  the 
perfect  work  of  art  it  is  intended  that  I 
should  make  of  it  —  but  the  marble  where- 
from,  with  patient  chisel,  I  must  liberate 
the  perfect  and  triumphant  Me  !  As  a 
poet  listening  with  trembling  ear  to  the 
voice  of  his  inspiration,  so  I  tremulously 
ask  myself — what  is  the  divine  concep- 
tion that  is  to  become  embodied  in  me, 
what  is  the  divine  meaning  of  Me?  How 
best  shall  I  express  it  in  look,  in  word,  in 
deed,  till  my  outer  self  becomes  the  truth- 
ful symbol  of  my  inner  self — till,  in  fact, 
I  have  successfully  placed  the  best  of  my- 
self on  the  outside — for  others  besides 
myself  to  see,  and  know  and  love  ? 

What  is  my  part,  and  how  am  I  to 
play  it  ? 

Returning  to  the  latter  image,  there  are 
two  difficulties  that  beset  one  in  playing  a 
part  on  the  stage  of  life,  right  at  the  out- 
set. You  are  not  allowed  to  'look  '  it,  or 
'dress'  it!      What  would  an  actor  think, 


PROSE    FANCIES      135 

who,  asked  to  play  Hamlet,  found  that  he 
would  be  expected  to  play  it  without  make- 
up and  in  nineteenth  century  costume  ? 
Yet  many  of  us  are  in  a  like  dilemma  with 
similar  parts.  Actors  and  audience  must 
all  wear  the  same  drab  clothes  and  the 
same  immobile  expression.  It  is  in  vain 
you  protest  that  you  do  not  really  belong 
to  this  absurd  and  vulgar  nineteenth  cen- 
tury, that  you  have  been  spirited  into  it 
by  a  cruel  mistake,  that  you  really  belong 
to  mediaeval  Florence,  to  Elizabethan, 
Caroline,  or  at  latest  Queen  Anne  Eng- 
land, and  that  you  would  like  to  be  allowed 
to  look  and  dress  as  like  it  as  possible.  It 
is  no  use;  if  you  dare  to  look  or  dress  like 
anything  but  your  own  tradesmen — and 
other  critics  —  it  is  at  your  peril.  If  you 
are  beautiful  you  are  expected  to  disguise 
a  fact  that  is  an  open  insult  to  every  other 
person  you  look  at ;  and  you  must,  as  a 
general  rule,  never  look,  wear,  feel,  or  say 
what  everybody  else  is  not  also  looking, 
wearing,  feeling,  or  saying. 

Thus  you  get  some  hint  of  the  difficulty 
of  playing  the  part  of  yourself  on  this 
stage  of  life. 


136      PROSE    FANCIES 

In  these  matters  of  dressing  and  look- 
ing your  part  musicians  seemed  granted  an 
immunity  denied  to  all  their  fellow-artists. 
Perhaps  it  is  taken  for  granted  that  the 
musician  is  a  fool — the  British  public  is 
so  intuitive.  Yet  it  takes  the  same  view 
of  the  poet  —  without  allowing  him  a  like 
immunity.  And,  by  the  way,  what  a  fine 
conception  of  his  part  had  Tennyson  :  of 
the  dignity,  the  mystery,  the  picturesque- 
ness  of  it.  Tennyson  would  have  felt  it 
an  artistic  crime  to  look  like  his  publisher; 
yet  what  poet  is  there  left  us  to-day  half 
so  distinguished-looking  as  his  publisher? 

Indeed,  curiously  enough,  among  no 
set  of  men  does  the  desire  to  look  as  com- 
monplace as  the  rest  of  the  world  seem  so 
strong  as  among  men  of  letters.  Perhaps 
it  is  out  of  consideration  for  the  rest  of 
the  world  ;  but  whatever  the  reason,  im- 
mobility of  expression  and  general  medi- 
ocrity of  style  are  more  characteristic  of 
them  at  present  then  even  the  military. 

It  is  surely  a  strange  paradox  that  we 
should  pride  ourselves  on  schooling  to 
foolish  insensibility,  on  eliminating  from 
them  every  mark  of  individual   character, 


PROSE    FANCIES      137 

the  faces  that  were  intended  subtly  and 
eloquently  to  image  our  moods  —  to  look 
glad  when  we  are  glad,  sorry  when  we  are 
sorry,  angry  in  anger,  and    lovely  in  love. 

The  impassivity  of  the  modern  young 
man  is  indeed  a  weird  and  wonderful 
thing.  Is  it  a  mark  to  hide  from  us  the 
appalling  sins  he  none  the  less  openly 
affects?  Is  it  meant  to  conceal  that  once 
in  his  life  he  paid  a  wild  visit  to 'The 
Empire' — by  kind  indulgence  of  the 
County  Council  ?  that  he  once  chucked 
a  barmaid  under  the  chin,  that  he  once 
nearly  got  drunk,  that  he  once  spoke  to  a 
young  lady  he  did  not  know  —  and  then 
ran  away? 

One  sighs  for  the  young  men  of  the 
days  of  Gautier  and  Hugo,  the  young  men 
with  red  waistcoats  who  made  asses  of 
themselves  at  first  nights  and  on  the  barri- 
cades, young  men  with  romance  in  their 
hearts  and  passion  in  their  blood,  fear- 
lessly sentimental  and  picturesquely  every- 
thing. 

The  lover  then  was  not  ashamed  that 
you  should  catch  radiant  glimpses  of  his 
love   in   his   eyes  —  nay  !    if   you    smiled 


138      PROSE    FANCIES 

kindly  on  him,  he  would  take  you  by  the 
arm  and  insist  on  you  breaking  a  bottle 
with  him  in  honour  of  his  mistress.  Joy 
and  sorrow  then  wore  their  appropriate 
colours,  according,  so  to  say,  to  the 
natural  sumptuary  laws  of  the  emotions  — 
one  of  which  is  that  the  right  place  for  the 
heart  is  the  sleeve. 

It  is  the  duty  of  those  who  are  great,  or 
to  whom  great  destinies  of  joy  or  sorrow 
have  been  dealt,  to  wear  their  distinctions 
for  the  world  to  see.  It  is  good  for  the 
world,  which,  in  its  crude  way,  indicates 
the  rudiments  of  this  dramatic  art  of  life, 
when  it  decrees  that  the  bride  shall  walk 
radiant  in  orange  blossom,  and  the  mourner 
sadden  our  streets  with  black  —  symbols 
ever  passing  before  us  of  the  moving  vicis- 
situdes of  life. 

The  mourner  cannot  always  be  sad,  or 
the  bride  merry  ;  the  bride  indeed  some- 
times weeps  at  the  altar,  and  the  mourner 
laughs  a  savage  cynical  laugh  at  the  grave  ; 
but  for  those  moments  in  which  they 
awhile  forget  parts  more  important  than 
themselves,  the  tailor  and  the  dressmaker 
have  provided  symbolical  garments,  just  as 


PROSE    FANCIES      139 

military  decorations  have  been  provided 
for  heroes  without  the  gift  of  looking 
heroic,  and  sacerdotal  vestments  for  the 
priest,  who,  like  a  policeman,  is  not 
always  on  duty. 

In  playing  his  part  the  conscientious  art- 
ist in  life,  like  any  other  actor,  must  often 
seem  to  feel  more  than  he  really  feels  at  a 
given  moment,  say  more  than  he  means. 
In  this  he  is  far  from  being  insincere  — 
though  he  must  make  up  his  mind  to  be 
accused  daily  of  insincerity  and  affecta- 
tion. On  the  contrary,  it  will  be  his  very 
sincerity  that  necessitates  his  make-believe. 
With  his  great  part  ever  before  him  in  its 
inspiring  completeness,  he  must  be  care- 
ful to  allow  no  merely  personal  accident 
of  momentary  feeling  or  action  to  jeopard- 
ize the  general  effect.  There  are  mo- 
ments, for  example,  when  a  really  true 
lover,  owing  to  such  masterful  natural 
facts  as  indigestion,  a  cold,  or  extreme 
sleepiness,  is  unable  to  feel  all  that  he 
knows  he  really  feels.  To  'tell  the  truth,' 
as  it  is  called,  under  such  circumstances, 
would  simply  be  a  most  dangerous  form  of 
lying.      There  is  no  duty  we  owe  to  truth 


140      PROSE    FANCIES 

more  imperative  than  that  of  lying  stoutly 
on  occasion  —  for,  indeed,  there  is  often  no 
other  way  of  conveying  the  whole  truth 
than  by  telling  the  part-lie. 

A  watchful  sincerity  to  our  great  con- 
ception of  ourselves  is  the  first  and  last 
condition  of  our  creating  that  finest  work 
of  art — a  per.'^onality;  for  a  personality, 
like  a  poet,  is  not  only  born,  but  made. 


PROSE    FANCIES— XV 

THE    ARBITRARY    CLASSIFI- 
CATION   OF    SEX. 


IN  an  essay  on  Vauvenargues  Mr.  John 
Morley  speaks  with  characteristic  caus- 
ticity of  those  epigrammatists  '  who 
persist  in  thinking  of  man  and  woman  as 
two  different  species,'  and  who  make  ver- 
bal capital  out  of  the  fancied  distinction  in 
the  form  of  smart  epigrams  beginning  '■Les 
femmes.^  It  is  one  of  Shakespeare's  car- 
dinal characteristics  that  he  understood 
woman.  Mr.  Meredith's  fame  as  a  novel- 
ist is  largely  due  to  the  fact  that  he,  too, 
understands  women.  The  one  spot  on  the 
sun  of  Robert  Louis  Stevenson's  fame,  so 
we  are  told,  is  that  he  could  never  draw  a 
woman.  His  capacity  for  drawing  men 
counted  for  nothing,  apparently,  beside 
this  failure.  Evidently  the  Sphinx  has  not 
the  face  of  a  woman  for  nothing.  That 
is  why  no  one  has  read  her  riddle,  trans- 
lated her  mystic  smile.     Yet  many  people 

141 


142      PROSE    FANCIES 

smile  mysteriously,  without  any  profound 
meanings  behind  their  smile,  with  no  other 
reason  than  a  desire  to  mystify.  Perhaps 
the  Sphinx  smiles  to  herself  just  for  the 
fun  of  seeing  us  take  her  smile  so  seriously. 
And  surely  women  must  so  smile  as  they 
hear  their  psychology  so  gravely  discussed. 
Of  course,  the  superstition  is  invaluable  to 
them,  and  it  is  only  natural  that  they 
should  make  the  most  of  it.  Man  is  sup- 
posed to  be  a  complete  ignoramus  in  re- 
gard to  all  the  specialised  female  *  depart- 
ments '  —  from  the  supreme  mystery  of 
the  female  heart  to  the  humble  domestic 
mysteries  of  a  household.  Similarly,  men 
are  supposed  to  have  no  taste  in  women's 
dress,  yet  for  whom  do  women  clothe 
themselves  in  the  rainbow  and  the  sea- 
foam,  if  not  to  please  men  ?  And  was  not 
the  high-priest  of  that  delicious  and  fas- 
cinating mystery  a  man  —  if  it  be  proper  to 
call  the  late  M.  Worth  a  man  —  as  the 
best  cooks  are  men,  and  the  best  waiters .'' 
It  would  seem  to  be  assumed  from  all 
this  mystification  that  men  are  beings  clear 
as  daylight,  both  to  themselves  and  to 
women.     Poor,  simple,  manageable  souls, 


PROSE    FANCIES      143 

their  wants  are  easily  satisfied,  their  psy- 
chology —  which,  it  is  implied,  differs  little 
from  their  physiology  —  long  since  mapped 
out. 

It  may  be  so,  but  it  is  the  opinion  of 
some  that  men's  simplicity  is  no  less  a 
fiction  than  women's  mysterious  complex- 
ity, and  that  human  character  is  made  up 
of  much  the  same  qualities  in  men  and 
women,  irrespective  of  a  merely  rudimen- 
tary sexual  distinction,  which  has,  of 
course,  its  proper  importance,  and  which 
the  present  writer  would  be  the  last  to  wish 
away.  From  that  quaint  distinction  of 
sex  springs,  of  course,  all  that  makes  life 
in  the  smallest  degree  worth  living,  from 
great  religions  to  tiny  flowers.  Love  and 
beauty  and  poetry,  Shakespeare's  plays, 
Burne-Jones's  pictures,  and  Wagner's 
operas — all  such  moving  expressions  of 
human  life,  as  science  has  shown  us,  spring 
from  the  all-important  fact  that  '  male 
and  female  created  He  them.' 

This  everybody  knows,  and  few  are  fool 
enough  to  deny.  Many  people,  however, 
confuse  this  organic  distinction  of  sex  with 
its  time-worn  conventional  symbols  ;  just 


144      PROSE    FANCIES 

as  religion  is  commonly  confused  with  its 
external  rites  and  ceremonies.  The  com- 
parison naturally  continues  itself  further; 
for,  as  in  religion,  so  soon  as  some  tradi- 
tional garment  of  the  faith  has  become  out- 
worn or  otherwise  unsuitable,  and  the  pro- 
posal is  made  to  dispense  with  or  substitute 
it,  an  outcrv  immediately  is  raised  that  re- 
ligion itself  is  in  danger  —  so  with  sex,  no 
sooner  does  one  or  the  other  sex  propose 
to  discard  its  arbitrary  conventional  char- 
acteristics, or  to  supplement  them  by  oth- 
ers borrowed  from  its  fellow-sex,  than  an 
outcry  immediately  is  raised  that  sex  itself 
is  in  danger. 

Sex  —  the  most  potent  force  in  the  uni- 
verse —  in  danger  because  women  wear 
knickerbockers  instead  of  petticoats,  or 
military  men  take  to  corsets  and  cosmetics  ! 

That  parallel  with  religion  may  be  pur- 
sued profitably  one  step  further.  In 
religion,  the  conventional  test  of  your 
faith  is,  not  how  you  live,  not  in  your 
kindness  of  heart  or  purity  of  mind,  but 
how  you  believe  —  in  the  Trinity,  in  the 
Atonement ;  and  do  you  turn  to  the  East 
during  the  recital  of  the  Apostles'  Creed  ? 


PROSE    FANCIES      145 

These  and  such,  as  every  one  knows,  are 
the  vital  matters  of  religion.  And  it  is 
even  so  with  sex.  You  are  not  asked  for 
the  realities  of  manliness  or  womanliness, 
but  for  the  shadows,  the  arbitrary  exter- 
nalities, the  fashions  of  which  change  from 
generation  to  generation. 

To  be  truly  womanly,  you  must  never 
wear  your  hair  short ;  to  be  truly  manly, 
you  must  never  wear  it  long.  To  be 
truly  womanly,  you  must  dress  as  daintily 
as  possible,  however  uncomfortably  ;  to  be 
truly  manly,  you  must  wear  the  most  hide- 
ous gear  ever  invented  by  the  servility  of 
tailors  —  a  strange  succession  of  cylinders 
from  head  to  heel ;  cylinder  on  head, 
cylinder  round  your  body,  cylinders  on 
arms  and  cylinders  on  legs.  To  be  truly 
womanly,  you  must  be  shrinking  and  cling- 
ing in  manner  and  trivial  in  conversation, 
you  must  have  no  ideas  and  rejoice  that 
you  wish  for  none ;  you  must  thank  Heaven 
that  you  have  never  ridden  a  bicycle  or 
smoked  a  cigarette ;  and  you  must  be 
prepared  to  do  a  thousand  other  absurd 
and  ridiculous  things.  To  be  truly  manly, 
you  must  be  and    do  the  opposite   of  all 


146      PROSE     P^  A  N  C  I  E  S 

these  things,  with  this  exception  —  that 
with  you  the  possession  of  ideas  is  optional. 
The  finest  specimens  of  British  manhood 
are  without  ideas,  but  that,  I  say,  is,  gen- 
erally speaking,  a  matter  for  yourself.  It 
is  indeed  the  only  matter  in  which  you 
have  any  choice.  More  important  matters, 
such  as  the  cut  of  your  clothes  and  hair, 
the  shape  of  vour  face,  the  length  of  your 
moustache  and  the  pattern  of  your  cane  — 
all  these  are  very  properly  regulated  for 
you  by  laws  of  fashion,  which  you  could 
never  dream  of  breaking.  You  may  break 
every  moral  law  there  is — or  rather,  was 
—  and  still  remain  a  man.  You  may  be  a 
bully,  a  cad,  a  coward  and  a  fool,  in  the 
poor  heart  and  brains  of  you  ;  but  so  long 
as  you  wear  the  mock  regimentals  of  con- 
temporary manhood,  and  are  above  all 
things  plain  and  undistinguished  enough, 
your  reputation  for  manhood  will  be  se- 
cure. There  is  nothing  so  dangerous  to  a 
reputation  for  manhood  as  brains  or  beauty. 
In  short,  to  be  a  true  woman  you  have 
onlv  to  be  pretty  and  an  idiot,  and  to  be  a 
true  man  you  have  only  to  be  brutal  and 
a  fool. 


PROSE    FANCIES      147 

From  these  misconceptions  of  manliness 
and  womanliness,  these  superstitions  of 
sex,  many  curious  confusions  have  come 
about.  The,  so  to  say,  professional  differ- 
entiation between  the  sexes  had  at  one 
time  gone  so  far  that  men  were  credited 
with  the  entire  monopoly  of  a  certain  set 
of  human  qualities,  and  women  with  the 
monopoly  of  a  certain  other  set  of  human 
qualities  ;  yet  every  one  of  these  are  qual- 
ities which  one  would  have  thought  were 
proper  to,  and  necessary  for,  all  human 
beings  alike,  male  and  female. 

In  a  dictionary  of  a  date  (1856)  when 
everything  on  earth  and  in  heaven  was 
settled  and  written  in  penny  cyclopedias 
and  books  of  deportment,  I  find  these  de- 
licious definitions  : — 

Manly  :  becoming  a  man  ;  firm  ;  brave ; 
undaunted  \  dignified  ;  noble  ;  stately  ;  not 
boyish  or  womanish. 

Womanly :  becoming  a  woman ;  femi- 
nine ;  as  womanly  behaviour. 

Under  Woman  we  find  the  adjectives 
—  soft,  mild,  pitiful  and  flexible,  kind, 
civil,  obliging,  humane,  tender,  timorous, 
modest. 


148      P  R  ()  S  E    FANCIES 

Who  can  doubt  that  the  dictionary 
maker  defined  and  distributed  his  adjec- 
tives aright  for  the  year  1856?  Since 
then,  however,  many  alarming  heresies 
have  taken  root  in  our  land,  and  some  are 
heard  to  declare  that  both  these  sets  of 
adjectives  apply  to  men  and  women  alike, 
and  are,  in  fact,  necessities  of  any  decent 
human  outfit.  Otherwise  the  conclusion 
is  obvious,  that  no  one  desirous  of  the 
adjective  'manly'  must  ever  be  —  soft, 
mild,  pitiful  and  flexible,  kind,  civil, 
obliging,  humane,  tender,  timorous,  or 
modest ;  and  no  one  desirous  of  the  ad- 
jective 'womanly'  —  be  firm,  brave,  un- 
daunted, dignified,  noble,  or  stately. 

But  surely  the  essentials  of 'manliness  * 
and  '  womanliness  *  belong  to  man  and 
woman  alike  —  the  externals  are  purely 
artistic  considerations,  and  subject  to  the 
vagaries  of  fashion.  In  art  no  one  would 
think  of  allowing  fashion  any  serious 
artistic  opinion.  It  is  usually  the  art 
which  is  out  of  fashion  that  is  most  truly 
art.  Similarly,  fashions  in  manliness  or 
womanliness  have  nothing  to  do  with  real 
manliness    or    womanliness.       Moreover, 


PROSE    FANCIES       149 

the  adjectives  '  manly  '  or  '  womanly,'  ap- 
plied to  works  of  art,  or  the  artistic  sur- 
faces of  men  and  women,  are  irrelevant  — 
that  is  to  say,  impertinent.  You  have 
no  right  to  ask  a  poem  or  a  picture  to  look 
manly  or  womanly,  any  more  than  you  have 
any  right  to  ask  a  man  or  a  woman  to  look 
manly  or  womanly.  There  is  no  such 
thing  as  looking  manly  or  womanly.  There 
is  looking  beautiful  or  ugly,  distinguished 
or  commonplace,  individual  or  insignifi- 
cant. The  one  law  of  externals  is  beauty 
in  all  its  various  manifestations.  To  ask 
the  sex  of  a  beautiful  person  is  as  absurd 
as  it  would  be  to  ask  the  publisher  the 
sex  of  a  beautiful  book.  Such  questions 
are  for  midwives  and  doctors. 

It  was  once  the  fashion  for  heroes  to 
shed  tears  on  the  smallest  occasion,  and 
it  does  not  appear  that  they  fought  the 
worse  for  it ;  some  of  the  firmest,  bravest, 
most  undaunted,  most  dignified,  most  no- 
ble, most  stately  human  beings  have  been 
women  ;  as  some  of  the  softest,  mildest, 
most  pitiful  and  flexible,  most  kind,  civil, 
obliging,  humane,  tender,  timorous  and 
modest    human   beings    have    been    men. 


ISO      PROSE    FANCIES 

Indeed,  some  of  the  bravest  men  that  ever 
trod  this  planet  have  worn  corsets,  and  it 
needs  more  courage  nowadays  for  a  man 
to  wear  his  hair  long  than  to  machine-gun 
a  whole  African  nation.  Moreover,  quite 
the  nicest  women  one  knows  ride  bicycles 
—  in  the  rational  costume. 


PROSE  FANCIES  — XVI 


THE     FALLACY     OF 
NATION 


IT  IS,  I  am  given  to  understand,  a 
familiar  axiom  of  mathematics  that 
no  number  of  ciphers  placed  in  front 
of  significant  units,  or  tens  or  hun- 
dreds of  units,  adds  in  the  smallest  de- 
gree to  the  numerical  value  of  those 
units.  The  figure  one  becomes  of  no 
more  importance  however  many  noughts 
are  marshalled  in  front  of  it  —  though,  in- 
deed, in  the  mathematics  of  human  nature 
this  is  not  so.  Is  not  a  man  or  vi^oman 
considered  great  in  proportion  to  the  num- 
ber of  ciphers  that  walk  in  front  of  him, 
from  a  humble  brace  of  domestics  to 
guards  of  honour  and  imperial  armies  ? 

A  parallel  profound  truth  of  mathemat- 
ics is,  that  a  nought,  however  many  times 
it  be  multiplied,  remains  nought ;  but 
again  we  find  the  reverse  obtain  in  the 
mathematics    of    human     nature.       One 

151 


152      PROSK    FANCIES 

might  have  supposed  that  the  result  of  one 
nobody  multiplied  even  fifty  million  times 
would  still  be  nobodv.  However,  such  is 
far  from  being  the  case.  Fifty  million 
nobodies  make  —  a  nation.  Of  course, 
there  is  no  need  for  so  many.  I  am  reck- 
oning as  a  British  subject,  and  speak  of 
fifty  million  merely  as  an  illustration  of 
the  general  fact  that  it  is  the  multiplication 
of  nobodies  that  makes  a  nation.  '  Increase 
and  multiply  '  was,  it  will  be  remembered, 
the  recipe  for  the  Jewish  nation. 

Nobodies  of  the  same  colour,  tongue, 
and  prejudices  have  but  to  congregate  to- 
gether in  a  crowd  sufficiently  big  for  other 
similar  crowds  to  recognise  them,  and  then 
thev  are  given  a  name  of  their  own,  and 
become  recognised  as  a  nation  —  one  of 
the  '  Great  Powers.' 

Beyond  those  differences  in  colour, 
tongue,  and  prejudices,  there  is  really  no 
difference  between  the  component  units  — 
or  rather  ciphers  —  of  all  these  several  na- 
tional crowds.  You  have  seen  a  proces- 
sion of  various  trades-unions  filing  toward 
Hyde  Park,  each  section  with  its  particu- 
lar banner  of  a  strange  device  :  '  the  United 


PROSE    FANCIES      153 

Guild  of  Paperhangers,'  '  the  Ancient 
Order  of  Plumbers,'  and  so  on.  And  you 
may  have  marvelled  to  notice  hou^  alike 
the  members  of  the  various  carefully  dif- 
ferentiated companies  were.  So  to  say, 
they  each  and  all  might  have  been  plumb- 
ers ;  and  you  could  n't  help  feeling  that  it 
would  n't  have  mattered  much  if  some  of 
the  paperhangers  had  by  mistake  got  walk- 
ing amongst  the  plumbers,  or  vice  versa. 

So  the  great  trades-unions  of  the  world 
file  past,  one  with  the  odd  word  '  Russia ' 
on  its  banner ;  another  boasting  itself 
^Germany' — this  with  a  particularly 
bumptious  and  self-important  young  man 
walking  backward  in  front  of  it,  in  the 
manner  of  a  Salvation  Army  captain,  and 
imperiously  waving  an  iron  wand ;  still 
another  '  nation  '  calling  itself  '  France  ' ; 
and  yet  another,  boasting  the  biggest  brass 
band,  and  called  '  England.'  Other 
smaller  bodies  of  nobodies,  that  is,  smaller 
nations,  file  past  with  humbler  tread  — 
though  there  is  really  no  need  for  their 
doing  so.  For,  as  we  have  said,  they  are 
in  every  particular  like  to  those  haughtier 
nations  who  take  precedence  of  them.     In 


154      PROSE     FANCIES 

fact,  one  or  two  of  them,  such  as  Norway 
and  Denmark  —  were  a  truer  system  of 
human  mathematics  to  obtain  —  are  really 
of  more  importance  than  the  so-called 
greater  nations,  in  that  among  their  no- 
bodies they  include  a  larger  percentage  of 
intellectual  somebodies. 

Remembering  that  percentage  of  wise 
men,  the  formula  of  a  nation  were  perhaps 
more  truly  stated  in  our  first  mathematical 
image.  The  wise  men  in  a  nation  are  as 
the  units  with  the  noughts  in  front  of 
them.  And  when  I  say  wise  men  I  do 
not,  indeed,  mean  merely  the  literary  men 
or  the  artists,  but  all  those  somebodies 
with  some  real  force  of  character,  people 
with  brains  and  hearts,  fighters  and  lovers, 
saints  and  thinkers,  and  the  patient  indus- 
trious workers.  Such,  if  you  consider, 
are  really  no  integral  part  of  the  nation 
among  which  they  are  cast.  They  have 
no  part  in  what  are  grandiloquently  called 
national  interests  —  war,  politics,  and 
horse-racing  to  wit.  A  change  of  Govern- 
ment leaves  them  as  unmoved  as  an  elec- 
tion for  the  board  of  guardians.  They 
would  as  soon  think  of  entering  Parliament 


PROSE    FANCIES      155 

or  the   County  Council,  as  of  yearning  to 
manage  the  gasworks,  or  to  go  about  with 
one   of   those    carts   bearing     the    legend 
'Aldermen  and    Burgesses  of  the  City  of 
London'    conspicuously    upon  its    front. 
Their  main  concern  in  political  changes  is 
the  rise  and  fall  of  the  income  tax,  and,  be 
the    Cabinet   Tory   or   Liberal,  their    rate 
papers  come  in  for  the  same  amount.      It 
is  likely  that  national  changes  would  affect 
them  but  little  more.      What  more  would 
a   foreign    invasion    mean  than    that    we 
should  pay  our  taxes  to  French,  Russian, 
or  German  officials,  instead  of  to  English 
ones  ?     French  and  Italians  do  our  cook- 
ing, Germans    manage   our  music,  Jews 
control    our     money     markets ;   surely    it 
would    make     little  difference   to    us    for 
France,  Russia,  or  Germany  to  undertake 
our    government.      The   worst   of    being 
conquered  by  Russia  would  be  the  neces- 
sity of  learning   Russian  ;  whereas  a  little 
rubbing  up  of  our  French  would  make  us 
comfortable  with  France.      Besides,  to  be 
conquered  by  France  would  save  us  cross- 
ing  the    Channel   to   Paris,  and   then  we 
might  hope  for  cafes  in  Regent  Street,  and 


156      PROSE    FANCIES 

an  emancipated  literature.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  so-called  national  interests  are  merely 
certain  private  interests  on  a  large  scale, 
the  private  interests  of  financiers,  ambitious 
politicians,  soldiers  and  great  merchants. 
Broadly  speaking,  there  are  no  rival  nations 
—  there  are  rival  markets ;  and  it  is  its 
Board  of  Trade  and  its  Stock  Exchange 
rather  than  its  Houses  of  Parliament  that 
virtually  govern  a  country.  Thus  one 
seaport  goes  down  and  another  comes  up, 
industries  forsake  one  country  to  bless 
another,  the  military  and  naval  strengths 
of  nations  fluctuate  this  way  and  that;  and 
to  those  whom  these  changes  affect  they 
are  undoubtedly  important  matters — the 
great  capitalist,  the  soldier,  and  the  politi- 
cian ;  but  to  the  quiet  man  at  home  with 
his  wife,  his  children,  his  books,  and  his 
flowers,  to  the  artist  busied  with  brave 
translunary  matters,  to  the  saint  with  his 
eyes  filled  with  '  the  white  radiance  of 
eternity,'  to  the  shepherd  on  the  hillside, 
the  milkmaid  in  love,  or  the  angler  at  his 
sport  —  what  are  these  pompous  commo- 
tions, these  busy,  bustling  mimicries  of 
reality?      England  will  be  just  as  good  to 


PROSE    FANCIES      157 

live  in  though  men  some  day  call  her 
France.  Let  the  big  busybodies  divide  her 
amongst  them  as  they  like,  so  that  they 
leave  one  alone  with  one's  fair  share  of 
the  sky  and  the  grass,  and  an  occasional,  not 
too  vociferous,  nightingale. 

The  reader  will  perhaps  forgive  the 
hackneyed  references  to  Sir  Thomas 
Browne  peacefully  writing  his  Religio 
Medici  amid  all  the  commotions  of  the 
Civil  War,  and  to  Gautier  calmly  correct- 
ing the  proofs  of  his  new  poems  during 
the  siege  of  Paris.  The  milkman  goes 
his  rounds  amid  the  crash  of  empires.  It 
is  not  his  business  to  fight.  His  business 
is  to  distribute  his  milk  —  as  much  after 
half-past  seven  as  may  be  inconvenient. 
Similarly,  the  business  of  the  thinker  is 
with  his  thought,  the  poet  with  his  poetry. 
It  is  the  business  of  politicians  to  make 
national  quarrels,  and  the  business  of  the 
soldier  to  fight  them.  But  as  for  the  poet 
—  let  him  correct  his  proofs,  or  beware  the 
printer. 

The  idea,  then,  of  a  nation,  is  a  grandilo- 
quent fallacy  in  the  interests  of  commerce 
and  ambition,  political  and   military.     All 


158      PROSE    FANCIES 

the  great  and  good,  clever  and  charming 
people  belong  to  one  secret  nation,  for 
which  there  is  no  name  unless  it  be  the 
Chosen  People.  These  are  the  lost  tribes 
of  love,  art,  and  religion,  lost  and  swamped 
amid  alien  peoples,  but  ever  dreaming  of  a 
time  when  they  shall  meet  once  more  in 
Jerusalem. 

Yet  though  they  are  thus  aliens,  taking 
and  wishing  no  part  in  the  organization  of 
the  '  nations '  among  which  they  dwell, 
this  does  not  prevent  those  nations  taking 
part  and  credit  in  them.  And  whenever  a 
brave  soldier  wins  a  battle,  or  an  intrepid 
traveller  discovers  a  new  land,  his  par- 
ticular nation  flatters  itself  as  though  it  — 
the  million  nobodies  —  had  done  it.  With 
a  profound  indifference  to,  indeed  an  active 
dislike  of,  art  and  poetry,  there  is  nothing 
on  which  a  nation  prides  itself  so  much  as 
upon  its  artists  and  poets,  whom,  invariably, 
it  starves,  neglects,  and  even  insults,  as 
long  as  it  is  not  too  silly  to  do  so. 

Thus  the  average  Englishman  talks  of 
Shakespeare  —  as  though  he  himself  had 
written  the  plays;  of  India  —  as  though 
he  himself  had  conquered  it.      And   thus 


PROSE    FANCIES      159 

grow  up  such  fictions  as  '  national  great- 
ness '  and  *  public  opinion.' 

For  what  is  'national  greatness'  but  the 
glory  reflected  from  the  memories  of  a  few 
great  individuals  ?  and  what  is  '  public 
opinion  '  but  the  blustering  echoes  of  the 
opinion  of  a  few  clever  young  men  on  the 
morning  papers  ? 

For  how  can  people  in  themselves  little 
become  great  by  merely  congregating  into 
a  crowd,  however  large  ?  And  surely 
fools  do  not  become  wise,  or  worth  listen- 
ing to,  merely  by  the  fact  of  their  banding 
together. 

A  '  public  opinion'  on  any  matter  except 
foot-ball,  prize-fighting,and  perhaps  cricket, 
is  merely  ridiculous  —  by  whatever  brutal 
physical  powers  it  may  be  enforced  — 
ridiculous  as  a  town  council's  opinion  upon 
art ;  and  a  nation  is  merely  a  big  fool  with 
an  army. 


PROSE    FANCIES— XVII 

THE       GREATNESS       OF 
MAN 


IGNORANT,  as  I  inevitably  am,  dear 
reader,  of  your  intellectual  and  spirit- 
ual upbringing,  I  can  hardly  guess 
whether  the  title  of  my  article  will  impress 
you  as  a  platitude  or  as  a  paradox.  Good- 
ness knows,  some  men  and  women  think 
quite  enough  of  themselves  as  it  is,  and, 
from  a  certain  momentary  point  of  view, 
there  may  seem  little  occasion  indeed  to 
remind  man  of  his  importance. 

I  refer  to  your  intellectual  and  spiritual 
upbringing,  because  I  venture  to  wonder 
if  it  was  in  the  least  like  my  own.  I  was 
brought  up,  I  rejoice  to  say,  in  the  bosom 
of  an  orthodox  Puritan  family,  I  hope 
that  family  rejoices  too.  I  was  led  and 
driven  to  believe  that  man  was  everybody, 
and  that  God  was  somebody  —  and  that 
not  merely  the  Sabbath,  but  the  whole 
universe,   was   made    for    man :    that   the 

j6o 


PROSE    FANCIES      i6i 

stars  were  his  bed-time  candles,  and  that 
the  sun  arose  to  ensure  his  catching  the 
8.37  of  a  morning. 

On  this  belief  I  acted  for  many  years. 
Every  young  man  believes  that  there  is  no 
god  but  God,  and  that  he  is  born  to  be  His 
prophet  —  though  perhaps  that  belief  is 
not  so  common  nowadays.  I  am  speaking 
of  many  years  ago. 

Science,  however,  has  long  since 
changed  all  that.  Those  terrible  Muses, 
geology,  astronomy,  and  particularly  biol- 
ogy, have  reduced  man  to  a  humility 
which,  if  in  some  degree  salutary,  becomes 
in  its  excess  highly  dangerous.  Why 
should  one  maggot  in  this  great  cheese  of 
the  world  take  itself  more  seriously  than 
others  ?  Why  dream  mightily  and  do 
bravely  if  we  are  but  a  little  higher  than 
the  beasts  that  perish  ?  Nature  cares 
nothing  about  us,  and  her  giant  forces 
laugh  at  our  fancies.  The  world  has  no 
such  meaning  as  we  thought.  Poets  and 
saints,  deluded  by  unhealthy  imaginations, 
have  misled  us,  and  it  is  quite  likely  that 
the  wild  waves  are  really  saying  nothing 
more  important  than  '  Beecham's  Pills.' 


i62      PROSE    FANCIES 

'  Give  us  a  definition  of  life,'  I  asked  a 
certain  famous  scientist  and  philosopher 
whom  I  am  privileged  to  call  my  friend, 
'  Nothing  easier  !  '  he  gaily  replied.  '  Life 
is  a  product  of  solar  energy,  falling  upon 
the  carbon  compounds,  on  the  outer  crust 
of  a  particular  planet  in  a  particular  corner 
of  the  solar  system.' 

'And  that,'  I  said,  '  really  satisfies  you 
as  a  definition  of  life  —  of  all  the  wistful 
wonder  of  the  world  !  '  And  as  I  spoke  I 
thought  of  Moses  with  mystically  shining 
face  upon  the  Mount  of  the  Law,  of 
Ezekiel  rapt  in  his  divine  fancies,  of 
Socrates  drinking  his  cup  of  hemlock,  of 
Christ's  agony  in  the  garden  ;  the  golden 
faces  of  the  great  of  the  world  passed  as  in 
a  dream  before  me,  —  soldiers,  saints, 
poets,  and  lovers.  I  thought  of  Horatius 
on  the  bridge,  of  the  holy  and  gentle  soul 
of  St.  Francis,  of  Chatterton  in  his  splen- 
did despair,  and  in  fancy  I  went  with  the 
awe-struck  citizens  of  Verona  to  rever- 
ently gaze  at  the  bodies  of  two  young 
lovers  who  had  counted  the  world  well 
lost  if  they  might  only  leave  it  together. 

The  carbon  compounds  ! 


PROSE    FANCIES      163 

I  took  down  Romeo  and  "Juliet^  listened 
to  its  passionate  spheral  music,  and  the 
carbon  compounds  have  never  troubled  me 
again. 

Love  laughs  at  the  carbon  compounds, 
and  a  great  book,  a  noble  act,  a  beautiful 
face,  make  nonsense  of  such  cheap  form- 
ulas for  the  mystery  of  human  life. 

Yet  this  parable  of  the  carbon  com- 
pounds is  a  fair  sample  of  all  that  science 
can  tell  us  when  we  come  to  ultimates.  We 
go  away  from  its  oracles  with  a  mouthful  of 
sounding  words,  which  may  seem  very 
impressive  till  we  examine  their  emptiness. 
What,  for  example,  is  all  this  rigmarole 
about  solar  energy  and  the  carbon  com- 
pounds but  a  more  pompous  way  of  put- 
ting the  old  scriptural  statement  that  man 
was  made  of  the  dust  of  the  ground  ?  To 
say  that  God  took  a  handful  of  dust  and 
breathed  upon  it  and  it  became  man,  is  no 
harder  to  realize  than  that  solar  rays  fall- 
ing upon  that  dust  should  produce  human- 
ity and  all  the  various  phantasmagoria  of 
life.  If  anything,  it  is  more  explanatory. 
It  leaves  us  with  an  inspiring  mystery  for 
explanation. 


i64      PROSE    FANCIES 

In  saying  this,  I  do  not  forget  our  debt 
to  science.  It  has  done  much  in  clearing 
our  minds  of  cant,  in  popularising  more 
systematic  thinking,  and  in  instituting 
sounder  methods  of  observation.  In  some 
directions  it  has  deepened  our  sense  of 
wonder.  It  has  broadened  our  conception 
of  the  universe,  though  I  fear  it  has  been 
at  the  expense  of  narrowing  our  concep- 
tion of  man.  With  Hamlet  it  contemptu- 
ously says,  '  What  is  this  quintessence  of 
dust ! '  It  is  so  impressed  by  the  mileage 
and  tonnage  of  the  universe,  so  abased 
before  the  stupendous  measurements  of  the 
cosmos,  the  appalling  infinity  and  eternity 
of  its  space  and  time,  that  it  forgets  the 
marvel  of  the  mind  that  can  grasp  all 
these  conceptions,  forgets  too  that,  big 
and  bullying  as  the  forces  of  nature  may 
be,  man  has  been  able  in  a  large  measure 
to  control,  indeed  to  domesticate,  them. 
Surely  the  original  fact  of  lightning  is  little 
more  marvellous  than  the  power  of  man 
to  turn  it  into  his  errand-boy  or  his  horse, 
to  light  his  rooms  with  it,  and  imprison  it 
in  pennyworths,  like  the  genius  in  the 
bottle,  in  the  underground  railway.     Mere 


PROSE    FANCIES      165 

size  seems  unimpressive  when  we  contem- 
plate such  an  extreme  of  littleness  as  say 
the  ant,  that  pin-point  of  a  personality, 
that  mere  speck  of  being,  yet  including 
within  its  infinitesimal  proportions  a  clever 
busy  brain,  a  soldier,  a  politician,  and  a 
merchant.  That  such  and  so  many  facul- 
ties should  have  room  to  operate  within 
that  tiny  body — there  is  a  marvel  before 
which,  it  seems  to  me,  the  billions  of  miles 
that  keep  us  from  falling  into  the  jaws  of 
the  sun,  and  the  tonnage  of  Jupiter,  are 
comparatively  insignificant  and  conceiv- 
able. 

No,  we  must  not  allow  ourselves  to  be 
frightened  by  the  mere  size  and  weight  of 
the  universe,  or  be  depressed  because  our 
immediate  genealogy  is  not  considered 
aristocratic.  Perhaps,  after  all,  we  are 
sons  of  God,  and  as  Mr.  Meredith  finely 
puts  it,  our  life  here  may  still  be 

*      ...      a  little  holding 
To  do  a  mighty  service.' 

'  Things  of  a  day ! '  exclaims  Pindar. 
*■  What  is  a  man  .''     What  is  a  man  not  ? ' 

It  is  good  for  our  Nebuchadnezzars,  the 
kings  of  the  world,  and  conceited,  success- 


i66      PROSE    FANCIES 

ful  people  generally,  to  measure  themselves 
against  the  great  powers  of  the  universe,  to 
humble  their  pride  by  contemplation  of  the 
fixed  stars ;  but  a  too  humble  attitude 
toward  the  Infinite,  a  too  constant  ponder- 
ing upon  eternity,  is  not  good  for  us,  un- 
less, so  to  say,  we  can  live  with  them  as 
friends,  with  the  inspiring  feeling  that, 
little  as  we  may  seem,  there  is  that  in  us 
which  is  no  less  infinite,  no  less  cosmic, 
and  that  our  passions  and  dreams  have,  as 
Mr.  William  Watson  puts  it,  '  a  relish  of 
eternitv.' 

Readers  of  Amiel's  '  Journal  '  will  know 
what  a  sterilising,  petrifying  influence  his 
trance-like  contemplation  of  the  Infinite 
had  upon  his  life.  Amiel  was  simply 
hypnotised  by  the  universe,  as  a  man  may 
hypnotise  himself  by  gazing  fixedly  at  a 
star. 

Mr.  Pater,  you  will  remember,  has  a 
remarkable  study  of  a  similar  temperament 
in  his  hnag'inary  Portraits.  Sebastian  van 
Storck,  like  Amiel,  had  become  hypnotised 
by  the  Infinite.  It  paralysed  in  him  all 
impulse  or  power  *to  be  or  do  any  limited 
thing.' 


PROSE    FANCIES      167 

'  For  Sebastian,  at  least,'  we  read,  'the 
world  and  the  individual  alike  had  been 
divested  of  all  effective  purpose.  The 
most  vivid  of  finite  objects,  the  dramatic 
episodes  of  Dutch  history,  the  brilliant  per- 
sonalities which  had  found  their  parts  to 
play  in  them,  that  golden  art,  surrounding 
one  with  an  ideal  world,  beyond  which 
the  real  world  was  discernible  indeed,  but 
etherealised  by  the  medium  through  which 
it  came  to  one  ;  all  this,  for  most  men  so 
powerful  a  link  to  existence,  only  set  him 
on  the  thought  of  escape  —  into  a  formless 
and  nameless  infinite  world,  evenly  grey. 
Actually  proud,  at  times,  of  his 
curious,  well-reasoned  nihilism,  he  could 
but  regard  what  is  called  the  business  of 
life  as  no  better  than  a  trifling  and  weari- 
some delay.' 

This  mood,  once  confined  to  a  few 
mystics,  is  likely  to  become  a  common 
one,  is  already,  one  imagines,  far  from  in- 
frequent—  so  the  increase  of  suicide 
would  lead  us  to  suppose.  Robbed  of  his 
hope  of  a  glorious  immortality,  stripped  of 
his  spiritual  significance,  bullied  and  be- 
littled by  science  on  every  hand,  man  not 


i68      PROSE    FANCIES 

unnaturally  begins  to  feel  that  it  it  no  use 
taking  his  life  seriously,  that,  in  fact,  it 
betrays  a  lack  of  humour  to  do  so.  While 
he  was  a  supernatural  being,  a  son  of  God, 
it  was  with  him  a  case  of  noblesse  oblige; 
and  while  he  is  happy  and  comfortable  he 
docs  n't  mind  giving  up  the  riddle  of  the 
world.  It  is  only  the  unhappy  that  ever 
really  think.  Hut  what  s  he  to  do  when 
agony  and  despair  come  upon  him,  when 
all  that  made  his  life  worth  living  is  taken 
from  him  ?  How  is  he  to  sustain  himself, 
where  shall  he  look  for  his  strength  or  his 
hope  ?  He  looks  up  at  the  sky  full  of 
stars,  but  he  is  told  that  God  is  not  there, 
that  the  city  of  God  is  long  since  a  ruin, 
and  that  owls  hoot  to  each  other  across 
its  moss-grown  fanes  and  battlements  ;  he 
looks  down  on  the  earth,  full  of  graves,  a 
vast  necropolis  of  once  radiant  dreams, 
with  the  living  for  its  phantoms — and 
there  is  no  comfort  anywhere.  Happy  is 
he  if  some  simple  human  duty  be  at  hand, 
which  he  may  go  on  doing  blindly  and 
dumbly  —  till,  perhaps,  the  light  come 
again.  It  is  difficult  to  offer  comfort  to 
such  a  one.      Comfort    is    cheap,  and   we 


PROSE    FANCIES      169 

know  nothing.  When  life  holds  nothing 
for  our  love  and  delight,  it  is  difficult  to 
explain  why  we  should  go  on  living  it  — 
except  on  the  assumption  that  it  matters, 
that  it  is,  in  some  mystical  way,  supremely 
important,  how  we  live  it — and  what  we 
make  of  those  joys  and  sorrows,  which, 
say  some,  are  but  meant  as  mystical  trials 
and  tests. 

Sebastian  van  Storck  refused  *■  to  be  or 
do  any  limited  thing,'  but  the  answer  to 
his  mysticism  is  to  be  found  in  a  finer 
mysticism,  that  which  says  that  there  is  no 
limited  act  or  thing,  but  that  the  signifi- 
cance, as  well  as  the  pathos,  of  eternity  is 
in  our  smallest  joys  and  sorrows,  as  in 
our  most  everyday  transactions,  and  the 
greatness  of  God  incarnate  in  His  humblest 
child. 

This,  the  old  doctrine  of  the  micro- 
cosm, seems  in  certain  moments,  moments 
one  would  wish  to  say,  of  divination, 
strangely  plain  and  clear — when,  in  Blake's 
words,  it  seems  so  easy  to 

'.    .    .      see  a  world  in  a  grain  of  sand, 
And  a  heaven  in  a  wild  flower  ; 
Hold  infinity  in  the  palm  of  your  hand 
And  Eternity  in  an  hour.' 


170      PROSE    FANCIES 

Perhaps  in  the  street,  an  effect  of  light, 
a  passing  face,  yes,  even  the  plaintive 
grind  of  a  street  organ,  some  such  every- 
day circumstance,  affects  you  suddenly  in 
quite  a  strange  way.  It  has  become  uni- 
versalised.  It  is  no  longer  a  detail  of  the 
Strand,  but  a  cryptic  symbol  of  human 
life.  It  has  been  transfigured  into  a  thing 
of  infinite  pathos  and  infinite  beauty,  and, 
sad  or  glad,  brings  to  you  an  inexplicable 
sense  of  peace,  an  unshakable  conviction 
that  man  is  a  spirit,  that  his  life  is  indeed 
of  supreme  and  lovely  significance,  and 
that  his  destiny  is  secure  and  blessed. 

Matthew  Arnold,  ever  sensitive  to  such 
spiritual  states,  has  described  these  trance- 
like visitations  in  '  The  Buried  Life  ' : 

'  Only,  but  this  is  rare  — 

When  a  beloved  hand  is  laid  in  ours, 

When,  jaded  with  the  rush  and  glare 

Of  the  interminable  hours, 

Our  eyes  can  in  another's  eyes  read  clear. 

When  our  world-deafen' d  ear 

Is  by  the  tones  of  a  loved  voice  caress'd  — 

A  bolt  is  shot  back  somewhere  in  our  breast, 

And  a  lost  pulse  of  feeling  stirs  again  : 

The  eyes  sink  inward,  and  the  heart  lies  plain, 

And  what  we  mean,  we  say,  and  what  we  would,  we  know. 

A  man  becomes  aware  of  his  life's  flow. 

And  hears  its  winding  murmur  ;   and  he  sees 

The  meadows  where  it  glides,  the  sun,  the  breeze. 


PROSE    FANCIES      171 

'And  there  arrives  a  lull  in  the  hot  race 
Wherein  he  doth  forever  chase 
That  flying  and  elusive  shadow,  rest. 
An  air  of  coolness  plays  upon  his  face, 
And  an  unwonted  calm  pervades  his  breast. 
And  then  he  thinks  he  knows 
The  hills  where  his  life  rose, 
And  the  sea  where  it  goes.' 

'  To  be  or  do  any  limited  thing'  !  What, 
indeed,  we  ask  in  such  hours,  is  a  limited 
thing,  when  all  the  humble  interests  of 
our  daily  life  are  palpably  big  with  eternity .'' 
Is  the  first  kiss  of  a  great  love  a  limited 
thing  ?  though  there  is,  unhappily,  no  de- 
nying that  it  comes  to  an  end  !  When  a 
young  husband  and  wife  smile  across  to 
each  other  above  the  sleep  of  their  little 
child  —  is  that  a  limited  thing.?  When 
the  siren  voices  of  the  world  blend  together 
on  the  lips  of  a  young  poet,  and  with  rapt 
eyes  and  hot  heart  he  makes  a  song  as 
of  the  morning  stars  —  is  that  a  limited 
thing .''  Are  love,  and  genius,  and  duty 
done  in  the  face  of  death  —  are  these  lim- 
ited things.?  I  think  not  —  and  man,  in- 
deed, knows  better. 

Greatness  is  not  relative.  It  is  absolute. 
It  is  not  for  man  to  depress  himself  by 
measuring  himself  against  the  eternities  and 


172      PROSE    FANCIES 

the  immensities  external  to  him.  What 
he  has  to  do  is  to  look  inward  upon  him- 
self, to  fathom  the  eternities  and  the 
immensities  in  his  own  heart  and  brain. 

And  the  more  man  sees  himself  forsaken 
by  the  universe,  the  more  opportunity  to 
vindicate  his  own  greatness.  Is  there  no 
kind  heart  beating  through  the  scheme  of 
things?  —  man's  heart  shall  still  be  kind. 
Will  the  eternal  silence  make  mock  of  his 
dreams  and  his  idealisms,  laugh  coldly  at 
'  the  splendid  purpose  in  his  eyes  '  ?  Well, 
so  be  it.  His  dreams  and  idealisms  are 
none  the  less  noble  things,  and  if  the  gods 
do  thus  make  mock  of  mortal  joy  and  pain 
—  let  us  be  grateful  that  we  were  born 
mere  men. 

Moreover,  he  has  one  great  answer  to 
the  universe — the  answer  of  courage. 
He  is  still  Prometheus,  and  there  is  no 
limit  to  what  he  can  bear.  Let  the  vult- 
ures of  pain  rend  his  heart  as  they  will,  he 
can  still  hiss  '  coward '  in  the  face  of  the 
Eternal.  Nay,  he  can  even  laugh  at  his 
sufferings —  thanks  to  the  spirit  of  humour, 
that  most  blessed  of  ministering  angels, 
without  which  surely  the  heart  of  humanity 


PROSE    FANCIES      173 

had  long  since  broken,  by  which  man  is 
able  to  look  with  a  comical  eye  upon 
terrors,  as  it  were  taking  themselves  so 
seriously,  coming  with  such  Olympian 
thunders  and  lightnings  to  break  the  spirit 
of  a  mere  six  foot  of  earth  ! 

But  while  his  courage  and  his  humour 
are  defenses  of  which  he  cannot  be 
disarmed,  whatever  be  the  intention  of  the 
Eternal,  it  is  by  no  means  certain  that 
nature  does  not  mean  kindly  by  man. 
Perhaps  the  pain  of  the  world  is  but  the 
rough  horseplay  of  great  powers  that  mean 
but  jest  —  and  kill  us  in  it:  as  though 
one  played  at  '  tick '  with  an  elephant  ! 

Perhaps,  after  all,  who  knows  —  God  is 
love,  and  His  great  purpose  kind. 

Surely,  when  you  think  of  it,  the  exist- 
ence in  man  of  the  senses  of  love  and  pity 
implies  the  probability  of  their  existence 
elsewhere  in  the  universe. 

'  Into  that  breast  which  brings  the  rose 
Shall  I  with  shuddering  fall . ' 

So  runs  the  profoundest  thought  in 
modern  poetry  —  and  need  I  say  it  is  Mr. 
Meredith's  ? 

As  the  fragrance  and  colour  of  the  rose 


174      PRC)SE    FANCIES 

must  in  some  occult  way  be  properties  of 
the  rude  earth  from  which  they  are  drawn 
by  the  sun,  may  not  human  love  also  be 
a  kindly  property  of  matter — that  myste- 
rious life-stuff  in  which  is  packed  such 
marvellous  potentialities  ?  Evidently  love 
must  be  somewhere  in  the  universe  — 
else  it  had  not  got  into  the  heart  of  man  ; 
and  perhaps  pity  slides  down  like  an  angel 
in  the  rays  of  the  solar  energy,  while 
there  is  the  potential  beating  of  a  human 
heart  even  in  the  hard  crust  of  the  carbon 
compounds. 

I  confess  that  this  seems  to  me  no  mere 
fancy,  but  a  really  comforting  speculation. 
Pain,  we  say,  is  inherent  in  the  scheme  of 
the  universe  ;  but  is  not  love  seen  to  be 
no  less  inherent,  too  ? 

There  must  be  some  soul  of  beauty  to 
animate  the  lovely  face  of  the  world,  some 
soul  of  goodness  to  account  for  its  saints. 
If  the  gods  are  cruel,  it  is  strange  that  man 
should  be  so  kind,  and  that  some  pathetic 
spirit  of  tenderness  should  seem  to  stir 
even  in  the  bosoms  of  beasts  and  birds. 

Meanwhile,  we  cannot  too  often  insist 


PROSE    FANCIES      175 

that,  whatever  uncertainties  there  be,  man 
has  one  certainty — himself.  Science  has 
really  adduced  nothing  essential  against  his 
significance.  That  he  is  not  as  big  as  an 
Alp,  as  heavy  as  a  star,  or  as  long-lived  as 
an  eagle,  is  nothing  against  his  proper  im- 
portance. Even  a  nobleman  is  of  more 
significance  in  the  w^orld  than  his  acres, 
and  giants  are  not  proverbial  for  their  in- 
tellectual or  spiritual  qualities.  The  ant 
is  of  more  importance  than  the  ass,  and 
the  great  eye  of  a  beautiful  woman  is  more 
significant  than  the  whole  clayey  bulk  of 
Mars. 

After  all  the  scientific  mockery  of  the 
old  religious  ideal  of  the  importance  of 
man,  one  begins  to  wonder  if  his  Ptolemaic 
fancy  that  he  was  the  centre  of  the  uni- 
verse, and  that  it  was  all  made  for  him, 
is  not  nearer  the  truth  than  the  pitiless 
theories  which  hardly  allow  him  equality 
with  the  flea  that  perishes. 

Suppose  if,  after  all,  the  stars  were  really 
meant  as  his  bedtime  candles,  and  the 
sun's  purpose  in  rising  is  really  that  he 
may  catch  the  8.37  ! 


176      PROSE    FANCIES 

For,  as  Sir  Thomas  Browne  says  in  his 
solemn  English,  'there  is  surely  a  piece  of 
Divinity  in  us,  something  that  was  before 
the  elements,  and  owes  no  homage  unto 
the  sun.' 

The  long  winter  of  materialistic  science 
seems  to  be  breaking  up,  and  the  old  ideals 
are  seen  trooping  back  with  something 
more  than  their  old  beauty,  in  the  new 
spiritual  spring  that  seems  to  be  moving  in 
the  hearts  of  men. 

After  all  its  talk,  science  has  done  little 
more  than  correct  the  misprints  of  religion. 
Essentially,  the  old  spiritualistic  and  poetic 
theories  of  life  are  seen,  not  merely  weakly 
to  satisfy  the  cravings  of  man's  nature,  but 
to  be  mostly  in  harmony  with  certain 
strange  and  moving  facts  in  his  constitu- 
tion, which  the  materialists  unscientifically 
ignore. 

It  was  important,  and  has  been  helpful, 
to  insist  that  man  is  an  animal,  but  it  is 
still  more  important  to  insist  that  he  is  a 
spirit  as  well.  He  is,  so  to  say,  an  animal 
by  accident,  a  spirit  by  birthright :  and, 
however  homely  his  duties  may  occasionally 


PROSE    FANCIES       177 

seem,  his  life  is  bathed  in  the  light  of  a 
sacred  transfiguring significance,its  smallest 
acts  flash  with  divine  meanings,  its  highest 
moments  are  rich  with  '  the  pathos  of 
eternity,'  and  its  humblest  duties  mighty 
with  the  responsibilities  of  a  god. 


PROSE  FANCIES—XVIII 

DEATH    AND     TWO     FRIENDS 

A  DIALOGUE 

(To  the  memory  of  J.  S.  and  T.  C.  L. ) 

¥ 

Persons:  Scriptor  and  Lector.* 

LECTOR  :     But  do  you  really  mean, 
Scriptor,  that  you  have    no  desire 
for  the  life  after  death  ? 
Scriptor  :   I  never  said  quite  that.  Lec- 
tor, though   perhaps    I    might  almost  have 
gone  so  far.      What  I  did  say  was  that  we 
have   been  accustomed   to  exaggerate   its 
importance  to   us   here   and   now,  that  it 
really  matters  less  to  us  than  we  imagine. 
Lector  :    I  see.      But  you  must  speak 
for   yourself,  Scriptor.      I   am  sure  that  it 

*This  dialogue  was  written  originally  as  a  rejoinder  to 
certain  criticisms  on  a  book  of  mine  entitled,  The  Re- 
ligion of  a  Literary  Man — Religio  Scriptoris  — 
hence  the  names  given  to  the  two  '  persons.'  It  was 
written  in  March,  1 894,  before  an  event  in  the  writer's 
life  to  which,  erroneously,  some  have  supposed  it  to  refer. 

178 


PROSE    FANCIES      179 

matters  much  to  many,  to  most  of  us.  It 
does,  I  know,  to  me, 

ScRiPTOR  :  Less  than  you  think,  my 
dear  Lector.  Besides,  you  are  really  too 
young  to  know.  It  is  true  that,  as  years 
go,  you  are  ten  years  my  senior,  but  what 
of  that?  You  have  that  vigorous  health 
which  is  the  secret  of  perpetual  youth. 
You  have  not  yet  realised  decay,  not  to 
speak  of  death.  The  immortality  of  the 
soul  is  a  question  wide  of  you,  who  have 
as  yet  practically  no  doubt  of  the  immor- 
tality of  the  body.  But  I  —  well,  it  would 
be  melodramatic  to  say  that  I  face  death 
every  day.  The  metaphor  applies  but  to 
desperate  callings  and  romantic  complaints. 
To  some  Death  comes  like  a  footpad,  sud- 
denly, and  presents  his  pistol  —  and  the 
smoke  that  curls  upward  from  his  empty 
barrel  is  your  soul. 

To  another  he  comes  featureless,  a 
stealthily  accumulating  London  fog,  that 
slowly,  slowly  chokes  the  life  out  of  you, 
without  allowing  you  the  consolation  of  a 
single  picturesque  moment,  a  single  grand 
attitude.  For  you,  probably.  Death  will 
only  come  when  you  die.     I   have  to  live 


i8o      PROSE    FANCIES 

with  him  as  well.  I  shall  smoulder  for 
years,  you  will  be  carried  to  heaven,  like 
Enoch,  in  a  beautiful  lightning  — 

'  A  simple  child 
That  lightly  draws  its  breath, 
And  feels  its  life  in  every  limb, 
What  can  it  know  of  death  ?  * 

That  's  you,  my  dear  Lector,  for  all 
your  forty  years. 

Lector:  All  the  more  reason,  Scriptor, 
that  you  should  desire  a  hereafter.  You 
sometimes  talk  of  the  work  you  would  do, 
if  you  were  a  robust  Philistine  such  as  L 
Would  it  not  be  worth  while  to  live  again, 
if  only  to  make  sure  of  that  magnum  opus 
—  just  to  realise  those  dreams  that  you 
say  are  daily  escaping  you  \ 

Scriptor  :  Ah  !  so  speaks  the  energetic 
man,  eager  to  take  the  world  on  his  shoul- 
ders. I  know  the  images  of  death  that 
please  you.  Lector  —  such  as  that  great 
one  of  Arnold's,  about  '  the  sounding 
labour-house  vast  of  being.' 

But,  Lector,  you  who  love  work  so 
well  —  have  you  never  heard  tell  of  a 
thing  called  Rest  ?  Have  you  never 
known   what  it  is  to  be  tired,  my  Lector  ? 


PROSE    FANCIES      i8i 

—  not  tired  at  the  end  of  a  busy  day,  but 
tired  in  the  morning,  tired  in  the  Mem- 
nonian  sunHght,  when  larks  and  barrel- 
organs  start  on  their  blithe  insistent 
rounds.  No,  the  man  who  is  tired  of  a 
morning  sings  not  music-hall  songs  in  his 
bedroom  as  he  dashes  about  in  his  morn- 
ing bath.  But  will  you  never  want  to  go 
to  bed.  Lector  ?  Will  you  be  always  like 
the  children  who  hate  to  be  sent  to  bed, 
and  think  that  when  they  are  grown  up 
they  will  never  go  to  bed  at  all  ?  Yet  in 
a  few  years'  time  how  glad  they  are  of  the 
stray  chance  of  bed  at  ten.  May  it  not  be 
so  with  sleep's  twin  brother  ?  In  our 
young  vigour,  driven  by  a  hundred  buoy- 
ant activities,  enticed  by  dream  on  dream, 
time  seems  so  short  for  all  we  think  we 
have  to  do;  but  surely  when  the  blood 
begins  to  thin,  and  the  heart  to  wax  less 
extravagantly  buoyant,  when  comfort 
croons  a  kettle-song  whose  simple  spell  no 
sirens  of  ambition  or  romance  can  over- 
come—  do  n't  you  think  that  then  '  bed- 
time '  will  come  to  seem  the  best  hour  of 
the  day,  and  '  Death  as  welcome  as  a  friend 
would  fall ' .? 


1 82      PROSE    FANCIES 

Lector  :  But  you  are  no  fair  judge, 
Scriptor.  You  say  my  health,  my  youth, 
as  you  waggishly  call  it,  puts  me  out  of 
court.  Yet  surely  your  ill-health  and  low 
spirits  just  as  surely  vitiate  your  judgment  ? 

Scriptor  :  Admitted, so  faras  my  views 
are  the  outcome  of  my  particular  condition. 
But  you  forget  that  the  condition  I  have 
been  supposing  is  not  merely  particular, 
but,  on  the  contrary,  the  most  general 
among  men.  Was  it  not  old  age  ? — 
which,  like  youth,  is  independent  of  years. 
You  may  be  young  beyond  your  years,  I 
may  be  old  in  advance  of  them  •,  but  old 
age  does  come  some  time,  and  with  it  the 
desire  of  rest. 

Lector  :  But  does  not  old  age  spend 
most  of  its  thought  in  dwelling  fondly  on 
its  lost  youth,  hanging  like  a  remote  sun- 
rise in  its  imagination  ?  Is  it  not  its  one 
yearning  desire  just  to  live  certain  hours  of 
its  youth  over  again  ? — and  would  the  old 
man  not  give  all  he  possesses  for  the  cer- 
tainty of  being  born  young  again  into 
eternity  ? 

Scriptor  :  He  would  give  everything 
—  but  the  certainty  of  rest.     After   sev- 


PROSE    FANCIES      183 

enty  years  of  ardent  life  one  needs  a  long 
sleep  to  refresh  us  in.  Besides,  age  may 
not  be  so  sure  of  the  advantages  of  youth. 
All  is  not  youth  that  laughs  and  glitters. 
Youth  has  its  hopes,  which  are  uncertain  ; 
but  age  has  its  memories,  which  are  sure  ; 
youth  has  its  passions,  but  age  has  its  com- 
forts. 

Lector  :  Your  answers  come  gay  and 
pat,  Scriptor,  but  your  voice  betrays  you. 
In  spite  of  you,  it  saddens  all  your  words. 
Tell  me,  have  you  ever  known  what  it  is 
actually  to  lose  any  one  who  is  dear  to  you  ? 
Have   you  looked  on  Death  face  to  face  ? 

Scriptor  :  Yes,  Lector,  I  have  —  but 
once.  It  is  now  about  five  years  ago,  but 
the  impression  of  it  haunts  me  to  this  hour. 
Perhaps  the  memory  is  all  the  keener  be- 
cause it  was  my  one  experience.  In  a 
world  where  custom  stales  all  things,  save 
Cleopatra,  it  is  all  the  better,  perhaps,  not 
to  see  even  too  much  of  Death,  lest  we 
grow  familiar  with  him.  For  instance, 
doctors  and  soldiers,  who  look  on  him 
daily,  seem  to  lose  the  sense  of  his  terror 
—  nay,  worse,  of  his  tragedy.  Maybe  it 
is  something  in  his  favour,  and  Death,  like 


i84      PROSE    FANCIES 

others,  may  only  need  to  be  known  to  be 
loved. 

Lector  :  But  tell  me,  Scriptor,  of  this 
sad  experience,  which,  even  now,  it  moves 
you  to  name  ;  or  is  the  memory  too  sad 
to  recall  ? 

ScRiPTOR :  Sad  enough,  Lector,  but 
beautiful  for  all  that,  beautiful  as  winter. 
It  was  winter  when  she  of  whom  I  am 
thinking  died — a  winter  that  seemed  to 
make  death  itself  whiter  and  colder  on  her 
marble  forehead.  It  is  but  one  sad  little 
story  of  all  the  heaped-up  sorrow  of  the 
world ;  but  in  it,  as  in  a  shell,  I  seem  to  hear 
the  murmur  of  all  the  tides  of  tears  that 
have  surged  about  the  lot  of  man  from  the 
beginning. 

There  were  two  dear  friends  of  mine 
whom  I  used  to  call  the  happiest  lovers  in 
the  world.  They  had  loved  truly  from 
girlhood  and  boyhood,  and  after  some 
struggle — for  they  were  not  born  into 
that  class  which  is  denied  the  luxury  of 
struggle — at  length  saw  a  little  home 
bright  in  front  of  them.  And  then  Jenny, 
who  had  been  ever  bright  and  strong,  sud- 
denly and    unaccountably    fell    ill.     Like 


PROSE    FANCIES      185 

the  stroke  of  a  sword,  like  the  stride  of  a 
giant,  Death,  to  whom  they  had  never 
given  a  thought,  was  upon  them.  It  was 
consumption,  and  love  could  only  watch 
and  pray.  Suddenly  my  friend  sent  for 
me,  and  I  saw  with  my  own  eyes  what,  at 
a  distance,  it  had  seemed  impossible  to  be- 
lieve. As  I  entered  the  house,  with  the 
fresh  air  still  upon  me,  I  spoke  confidently, 
with  babbling,  ignorant  tongue.  '  Wait 
till  you  see  her  face  ! '  was  all  my  poor 
stricken  friend  could  say. 

Ah  !  her  face !  How  can  I  describe  it  ? 
It  was  much  sweeter  afterwards,  but  now 
it  was  so  dark  and  witchlike,  so  uncanny, 
almost  wicked,  so  thin  and  full  of  inky 
shadows.  She  sat  up  in  her  bed,  a  wizened 
little  goblin,  and  laughed  a  queer,  dry, 
knowing  laugh  to  herself,  a  laugh  like  the 
scraping  of  reeds  in  a  solitarv  place.  A 
strange  black  weariness  seemed  to  be 
crushing  down  her  brows,  like  the  '  un- 
willing sleep  '  of  a  strong  narcotic.  She 
would  begin  a  sentence  and  let  it  wither 
away  unfinished,  and  point  sadly  and  al- 
most humorously  to  her  straight  black 
hair,   clammy   as  the   feathers  of  a  dead 


i86      PROSE    FANCIES 

bird  lying  in  the  rain.  Her  hearing  was 
strangely  keen.  And  yet  she  did  not 
know,  was  not  to  know.  How  was 
one  to  talk  to  her  —  talk  of  being  well 
again,  and  books  and  country  walks, 
when  she  had  so  plainly  done  with  all 
these  things  ?  How  bear  up  when  she, 
with  a  half-sad,  half- amused  smile 
showed  her  thin  wrists?  —  how  say  that 
they  would  soon  be  strong  and  round 
again?  Ugh!  she  was  already  beginning 
to  be  different  from  us,  already  putting  off 
our  body-sweet  mortality,  and  putting  on 
the  fearful  garments  of  Death,  changing  be- 
fore our  eyes  from  ruddy  familiar  humanity 
into  a  being  of  another  element,  an  ele- 
ment we  dread  as  the  fish  dreads  the  air. 
Soon  we  should  not  be  able  to  talk  to  her. 
Soon  she  would  have  unlearnt  all  the 
sweet  grammar  of  earth.  She  was  no 
longer  Jenny,  but  a  fearful  symbol  of  mys- 
teries at  which  the  flesh  crept.  She  was 
going  to  die. 

Have  you  never  looked  ahead  toward 
some  trial,  some  physical  trial,  maybe  an 
operation  ?  —  for  perhaps  the  pains  of  the 
body  are  the  keenest,  after  all  —  those  of 


PROSE    FANCIES      187 

the  spirit  are  at  least  in  some  part  meta- 
phor. You  look  forward  with  dread,  yet 
it  is  at  last  over.  It  is  behind  you.  And 
have  you  never  thought  that  so  it  will  be 
with  death  some  day  ?  Poor  little  Jenny 
was  to  face  the  great  operation. 

Next  time  I  saw  her  she  was  dead. 
In  our  hateful  English  fashion,  they  had 
shut  her  up  in  a  dark  room,  and  we  had  to 
take  candles  to  see  her.  I  shall  never 
forget  the  moment  when  my  eyes  first 
rested  on  that  awful  snow-white  sheet,  so 
faintly  indented  by  the  fragile  form  be- 
neath, lines  very  fragile,  but  oh  !  so  hard 
and  cold,  like  the  indentations  upon  frozen 
snow  ;  never  forget  my  strange  unaccount- 
able terror  when  he  on  one  side  and  I  on 
the  other  turned  down  the  icy  sheet  from 
her  face.  But  terror  changed  to  awe  and 
reverence,  as  her  face  came  upon  us  with 
its  sweet  sphinx-like  smile.  Lying  there, 
with  a  little  gold  chain  round  her  neck 
and  a  chrysanthemum  in  the  bosom  of  her 
night-gown,  there  was  a  curious  regality 
about  her,  a  look  as  though  she  wore  a 
crown  our  eyes  were  unable  to  see.  And 
while   I   gazed   upon  her,  the  sobs  of  my 


i88      PRO  SE    F  A  NC  I  ES 

friend  came  across  the  bed,  and  as  he 
called  to  her  I  seemed  to  hear  the  eternal 
Orpheus  calling  for  his  lost  Eurydice. 
Poor  lad! — poor  maid!  Here,  naked 
and  terrible,  was  all  the  tragedy  of  the 
world  compressed  into  an  hour,  the  Me- 
dusa-face of  life  that  turns  the  bravest  to 
stone.  Surely,  I  felt,  God  owed  more  than 
He  could  ever  repay  to  these  two  lovers, 
whom  it  had  been  so  easy  to  leave  to 
their  simple  joys.  And  from  that  night 
to  this  I  can  never  look  upon  my  white 
bed  without  seeing  afar  off  the  moment 
when  it,  too,  will  bear  the  little  figure  of 
her  I  love  best  in  the  world,  bound  for  her 
voyage  to  the  Minotaur  Death  ;  just  as  I 
never  put  off  my  clothes  at  night,  and 
stretch  my  limbs  down  among  the  cool 
sheets,  without  thinking  of  the  night  when 
I  shall  put  off  my  clothes  for  the  last  time 
and  close  my  eyes  for  ever. 

Lector  :  But,  my  friend,  this  is  to  feel 
too   much  ;   it  is  morbid. 

ScRiPTOR  :  Morbid  !  How  can  one 
really  feel  and  not  be  morbid  ?  If  one  be 
morbid,  one  can  still  be  brave. 

Lector  :   But  surely,  true-lover  as  you 


PROSE    FANCIES      189 

are,  it  would  be  a  joy  to  you  to  think  that 
this  terrible  parting  of  death  will  not  be 
final.  We  cannot  love  so  well  without 
hoping  that  we  may  meet  our  loved  ones 
somewhere  after  death. 

ScRiPTOR  :  Hopes !  wishes !  desires  ! 
What  of  them  ?  We  hope,  we  desire  all 
things.  Who  has  not  cried  for  the  moon 
in  his  time  ?  But  what  is  the  use  of  talk- 
ing of  what  we  desire  ?  Does  life  give  us 
all  we  wish,  however  passionately  we  wish 
it,  and  is  Death  any  more  likely  to  listen 
to  the  cry  of  our  desires  ?  Of  course  we 
wish  it^  wish  it  with  a  pathetic  urgency 
which  is  too  poignant  to  bear,  and  which 
the  wise  man  bravely  stifles.  It  would  all 
be  different  if  we  knew. 

Lector  :  But  does  not  science  even,  of 
late,  hold  out  the  promise  of  its  probabil- 
ity ?  —  and  the  greatest  poets  and  thinkers 
have  always  been  convinced  of  its  truth. 

ScRiPTOR :  The  promise  of  a  proba- 
bility !  O  my  Lector,  what  a  poor  sub- 
stitute is  that  for  a  certainty !  And  as 
for  the  great  men  you  speak  of,  what  does 
their  '  instinctive '  assurance  amount  to 
but  a  strong  sense  of  their  own  existence 


190      PROSE    FANCIES 

at  the  moment  of  writing  or  speaking  ? 
Does  one  of  them  anywhere  assert  im- 
mortality as  z  fact  —  a  fact  of  which  he 
has  his  own  personal  proof  and  knowledge 
—  a  scientific,  not  an  imaginative,  theo- 
logical fact  ?  Arguments  on  the  subject 
are  naught.  It  is  waste  of  time  to  read 
them  ;  unsupported  by  fact,  they  are  one 
and  all  cowardly  dreams,  a  horrible  hypo- 
critical clutching  at  that,  which  their  writ- 
ers have  not  the  courage  to  forego. 

Lector  :  Yet  may  not  a  dream  be  of 
service  to  reality,  my  friend  ?  Is  it  not 
certain  that  people  are  all  the  better  and 
all  the  happier  for  this  dream,  as  you  call 
it }  —  for  what  seems  to  me  this  sustaining 
faith  ? 

ScRiPTOR  :  Happier  i*  Some  people, 
perhaps,  in  a  lazy,  unworthy  fashion.  But 
'better'?  Well,  so  long  as  we  believed 
in  '  eternal  punishment'  no  doubt  people 
were  sometimes  terrified  into 'goodness  ' 
by  the  picture  of  that  dread  vista  of  tor- 
ment, as  no  doubt  thev  were  bribed  into  it 
by  the  companion  picture  of  a  green,  un- 
bounded Paradise  ;  but,  O  my  friend,  what 
an  unworthy  kind   of  goodness,  the  mere 


PROSE    FANCIES      191 

mask  of  virtue  !  And  now  that  the  Inferno 
has  practically  disappeared  from  our  theol- 
ogy, the  belief  in  eternal  life  simply  means 
unlimited  cakes  and  ale,  for  good  and  evil 
alike,  for  all  eternity.  How  such  a  belief 
can  be  moralising  I  fail  to  understand.  To 
my  mind,  indeed,  far  from  being  moralising 
this  belief  in  immortality  is  responsible  for 
no  inconsiderable  portion  of  the  wrong  and 
misery  of  the  world.  It  is  the  baneful 
narcotic  which  has  soothed  the  selfish  and 
the  slothful  from  the  beginning.  It  is 
that  unlimited  credit  which  makes  the 
bankrupt.  It  simply  gives  us  all  eternity 
to  procrastinate  in.  Instead  of  manfully 
eating  our  peck  of  dirt  here  and  now,  we 
leave  it  and  all  such  disagreeables  to  the 
hereafter. 

'  He  said,    "  I  believe  in  Eternal  Life," 
As  he  threw  his  life  away  — 

What  need  to  hoard  ? 

He  could  well  afford 
To  squander  his  mortal  day. 
With  Eternity  his,  what  need  to  care  ?  — 
A  sort  of  immortal  millionaire.' 

Lector  :  I  am  glad  to  be  reminded, 
Scriptor,  that  you  are  a  poet,  for  the  line 
of  your   argument   had   almost   made   me 


\ 


192      PROSE    FANCIES 

forget  it.  One  expects  other  views  from 
a  poet. 

ScRiPTOR  :  When,  my  dear  Lector,  will 
we  get  rid  of  the  silly  idea  that  the  poet 
should  give  us  only  the  ornamental  view 
of  life,  and  rock  us  to  sleep,  like  babies, 
with  pretty  lullabies  ?  Is  it  not  possible  to 
make  /acts  sing  as  well  as  fancies  ?  With 
all  this  beautiful  world  to  sing  of —  for 
beautiful  it  is,  however  it  be  marred;  with 
this  wonderful  life — and  wonderful  and 
sweet  it  is,  though  it  is  shot  through  with 
such  bitter  pain;  with  such  certainties  for 
his  theme,  we  yet  beg  him  to  sing  to  us 
of  shadows  ! 

And  you  talk  of  *  faith.'  '  Faith  '  truly 
is  what  we  want,  but  it  is  faith  in  the  life 
here,  not  in  the  life  hereafter.  Faith  in 
the  life  here  !  Let  our  poets  sing  us  that. 
And  such  as  would  deny  it  —  I  would 
hang  them  as  enemies  of  society. 

Lector  :  But,  at  all  events,  to  keep 
to  our  point  —  you  at  least  hope  tor  im- 
mortality. If  Edison,  say,  were  suddenly 
to  discover  it  for  us  as  a  scientific  cer- 
tainty, you  would  welcome  the  news  ? 

Scriptor:      Well,  yes  and  no  !      Have 


PROSE    FANCIES      193 

you  seen  the  *■  penny  '  phonographs  in  the 
Strand  ?   You  should  go  and  have  a  penny- 
worth of  the  mysteries  of  time  and  space  ! 
How    long    will    Edison's     latest    magic 
toy  survive  this  popularisation,  I  wonder  ? 
For  a  little  moment  it  awakens  the  sense 
of  wonder  in  the  idly  curious,  who  set  the 
demon    tube    to   their   ears  ;    but  if  they 
make    any    remarks    at    all,  it   is   of   the 
cleverness   of  Mr.    Edison,  the   probable 
profits  of  the  invention  —  and  not  a  word 
of  the  wonder  of  the  world  !      So  it  would 
be  with  the  undiscovered  country.     I  was 
blamed    the    other   day   as  being  cheaply 
smart  because  I  said  that  if  '  one  traveller 
returned,'  his  resurrection  would  soon  be 
as  commonplace  as  the  telephone,  and  that 
enterprising  firms  would   be  interviewing 
him  as  to  the  prospects  of  opening  branch 
establishments  in  Hades.     Yet  it  is  a  per- 
fectly  serious,  and   I  think  true,  remark  ; 
for  who  that  knows  the  modern  man,  with 
his  small   knowingness,  and   his   utter  in- 
capacity for  reverence,  would  doubt  that 
were     Mr.    Edison    actually    to    be    the 
Columbus  of  the   Unseen,  it  would   soon 
be    as    overrun    with    gaping    tourists    as 


194      PROSE    FANCIES 

Switzerland,  and  that  within  a  year  rail- 
way companies  would  be  advertising 
*■  Hank-holidays  in  Eternity  '  ? 

No  !  let  us  keep  the  Unseen  —  or,  if  it 
must  be  discovered,  let  the  key  thereof  be 
given  only  to  true-lovers  and  poets. 


PROSE    FANCIES— XIX 

A    SEAPORT    IN    THE    MOON. 


NO  ONE  is  SO  hopelessly  wrong 
about  the  stars  as  the  astronomer, 
and  I  trust  that  you  never  pay  any 
attention  to  his  remarks  on  the  moon. 
He  knows  as  much  about  the  moon  as  a 
coiffeur  knows  of  the  dreams  of  the  fair 
lady  whose  beautiful  neck  he  makes  still 
more  beautiful.  There  is  but  one  opinion 
upon  the  moon  —  namely,  our  own.  And 
if  you  think  that  science  is  thus  wronged, 
reflect  a  moment  upon  what  science  makes 
of  things  near  at  hand.  Love,  it  says,  is 
merely  a  play  of  pistil  and  stamen,  our 
most  fascinating  poetry  and  art  is  '  degen- 
eration,' and  human  life,  generally  speak- 
ing, is  sufficiently  explained  by  the 'carbon 
compounds  ' —  God-a-mercy!  If  science 
makes  such  grotesque  blunders  about 
radiant  matters  right  under  its  nose,  how 
can  one  think  of  taking  its  opinion  upon 
matters  so  remote  as  the  stars  —  or  even 

195 


196      PROSE    P^  A  NCI  ES 

the  moon,  which  is  comparatively  near  at 
hand  ? 

Science  says  that  the  moon  is  a  dead 
world,  a  cosmic  ship  littered  with  the 
skeletons  of  its  crew,  and  from  which 
every  rat  of  vitality  has  long  since  escaped. 
It  is  the  ghost  that  rises  from  its  tomb 
every  night  to  haunt  its  faithless  lover, 
the  world.  It  is  a  country  of  ancient 
silver  mines,  unworked  for  centuries. 
You  may  see  the  gapmg  mouths  of 
the  dark  old  shafts  through  your  tele- 
scopes. You  may  even  see  the  rusting 
pit  tackle,  the  ruinous  engine-houses,  and 
the  idle  pick  and  shovel.  Or  you  may 
say  that  it  is  counterfeit  silver,  coined  to 
take  in  the  young  fools  who  love  to  gaze 
upon  it.  It  is,  so  to  speak,  a  bad  half-a- 
crown. 

As  you  will  !  but  I  am  of  Endymion's 
belief — and  no  one  was  ever  more  inti- 
mate with  the  moon.  For  me  the  moon 
is  a  country  of  great  seaports,  whither  all 
the  ships  of  our  dreams  come  home. 
From  all  quarters  of  the  world,  every  day 
of  the  week,  there  are  ships  sailing  to  the 
moon.      They  are  the  ships  that   sail  just 


PROSE    FANCIES      197 

when  and  where  you  please.  You  take 
your  passage  on  that  condition.  And  it  is 
ridiculous  to  think  for  what  a  trifle 
the  captain  will  take  you  on  so  long  a 
journey.  If  you  want  to  come  back,  just 
to  take  an  excut^ion  and  no  more,  just  to 
take  a  lighted  look  at  those  coasts  of  rose 
and  pearl,  he  will  ask  no  more  than  a  glass 
or  two  of  bright  wine  —  indeed,  when  the 
captain  is  very  kind,  a  flower  will  take  you 
there  and  back  in  no  time  ;  if  you  want 
to  stay  whole  days  there,  but  still  come 
back  dreamy  and  strange,  you  may  take  a 
little  dark  root  and  smoke  it  in  a  silver 
pipe,  or  you  may  drink  a  little  phial  of 
poppy-juice,  and  thus  you  shall  find  the 
Land  of  Heart's  Desire ;  but  if  you  are 
wise  and  would  stay  in  that  land  forever, 
the  terms  are  even  easier — a  little  powder 
shaken  into  a  phial  of  water,  a  little  piece 
of  lead  no  bigger  than  a  pea  and  a  farthing's 
worth  of  explosive  fire,  and  thus  also  you 
are  in  the  Land  of  Heart's  Desire  forever. 
I  dreamed  last  night  that  I  stood  on  the 
blustering  windy  wharf,  and  the  dark  ship 
was  there.  It  was  impatient,  like  all  of 
us,  to  leave  the  world.     Its  funnels  belched 


198      P  R  O  S  E    F  A  N  C  1  E  S 

black  smoke,  its  engines  throbbed  against 
the  quay  like  arms  that  were  eager  to 
strike  and  be  done,  and  a  bell  was  beating 
impatient  summons  to  be  gone.  The  dark 
captain  stood  ready  on  the  bridge,  and  he 
looked  into  each  of  our  faces  as  we  passed 
on  board.  '■  Is  it  for  the  long  voyage  ? '  he 
said.  'Yes!  the  long  voyage,'  I  said  — 
and  his  stern  eyes  seemed  to  soften  as  I 
answered. 

At  last  we  were  all  aboard,  and  in  the 
twinkling  of  an  eye  were  out  of  sight  of 
land.  Yet, once  afloat,  it  seemed  as  though 
we  should  never  reach  our  port  in  the 
moon — so  it  seemed  to  me  as  I  lay  awake 
in  my  little  cabin,  listening  to  the  patient 
thud  and  throb  of  the  great  screws,  beat- 
ing in  the  ship'  side  like  a  human  heart. 

Talking  with  my  fellow-voyagers,  I  was 
surprised  to  find  that  we  were  not  all  vol- 
unteers. Some  in  fact  complained  piti- 
fully. They  had,  they  said,  been  going 
about  their  business  a  day  or  two  before, 
and  suddenly  a  mysterious  captain  had  laid 
hold  of  them,  and  pressed  them  to  sail  this 
unknown  sea.  Thus,  without  a  v/ord  of 
warning  they  had  been  compelled  to  leave 


PROSE    FANCIES      199 

behind  them  all  they  held  dear.  This  one 
felt  was  a  little  hard  of  the  captain ;  but  those 
of  us  whose  position  was  exactly  the 
reverse,  who  had  friends  on  the  other  side, 
all  whose  hopes  indeed  were  invested  there, 
were  too  selfishly  expectant  of  port  to  be 
severe  on  the  captain  who  was  taking  us 
thither. 

There  were  three  friends  I  had  especially 
set  out  to  see  :  two  young  lovers  who  had 
emigrated  to  those  colonies  in  the  moon 
just  after  their  marriage,  and  there  was 
another.  What  a  surprise  it  would  be  to 
all  three,  for  I  had  written  no  letter  to  say 
I  was  coming.  Indeed,  it  was  just  a  sud- 
den impulse,  the  pistol  flash  of  a  long 
desire. 

I  tried  to  imagine  what  the  town  would 
be  like  in  which  they  were  now  living.  I 
asked  the  captain,  and  he  answered  with  a 
sad  smile,  that  it  would  be  just  exactly  as 
I  cared  to  dream  it. 

*  Oh,  well  then,'  I  thought,  '  I  know 
what  it  will  be  like.  There  shall  be  a 
great  restless,  tossing  estuary,  with  Atlantic 
winds  forever  ruffling  the  sails  of  busy 
ships,  ships   coming   home  with  laughter, 


200      PROSE    FANCIES 

ships  leaving  home  with  sad  sea-gull  cries 
of  farewell.  And  the  shaggy  tossing  water 
shall  be  bounded  on  either  bank  with  high 
granite  walls,  and  on  one  bank  shall  be  a 
fretted  spire  soaring  with  a  jangle  of  bells, 
from  amid  a  tangle  of  masts,  and  under- 
neath the  bells  and  the  masts  shall  go 
streets  rising  up  from  the  strand,  streets 
full  effaces,  and  sweet  with  the  smell  of 
tar  and  the  sea.  O,  captain,  will  it  be 
morning  or  night  when  we  come  to  my 
city  ?  In  the  morning  my  city  is  like  a 
sea-blown  rose,  in  the  night  it  is  bright 
as  a  sailor's  star. 

'  If  it  be  early  morning,  what  shall  I  do  ? 
I  will  run  to  the  house  in  which  my  friends 
lie  in  happy  sleep,  never  to  be  parted 
again,  and  kiss  my  hand  to  their  shrouded 
window;  and  then  I  will  run  on  and  on 
till  the  city  is  behind  and  the  sweetness  of 
country  lanes  is  about  me,  and  I  will 
gather  flowers  as  I  run,  from  sheer  wan- 
tonness of  joy,  and  then  at  last,  flushed 
and  breathless,  I  will  stand  beneath  her 
window.  I  shall  stand  and  listen,  and  I 
shall  hear  her  breathing  right  through  the 
heavy  curtains  and  the  hushed  garden  and 


PROSE    FANCIES      201 

the  sleeping  house  will  bid  me  keep 
silence,  but  I  shall  cry  a  great  cry  up  to 
the  morning  star,  and  say,  "  No,  I  will 
not  keep  silence.  Mine  is  the  voice  she 
listens  for  in  her  sleep.  She  will  wake 
again  for  no  voice  but  mine.  Dear  one, 
awake,  the  morning  of  all  mornings  has 
come  !  "  ' 

As  I  write,  the  moon  looks  down  at  me 
like  a  Madonna  from  the  great  canvas  of 
the  sky.  She  seems  beautiful  with  the 
beauty  of  all  the  eyes  that  have  looked  up 
at  her,  sad  with  all  the  tears  of  all  those 
eyes;  hke  a  silver  bowl  brimming  with 
the  tears  of  dead  lovers  she  seems.  Yes, 
there  are  seaports  in  the  moon,  there  are 
ships  to  take  us  there. 


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RICHARD    LE    CALLIENNE 


